The former scout, who spoke anonymously because of relationships he maintains around the NFL, including several at Valley Ranch, said that while he and every other scout out there collect the “measurable” info (height, weight, 40-yard dash. It sounds cliché, but how good he was in college is the best indicator of a player’s chance for success at the professional level. “I worked for a year in the USFL, and a guy who had played for me in the NFL called me, asking for a job. He said he’d sign for the minimum salary — he just wanted a chance to keep playing,” the former scout said. “I remembered that I really liked the guy when he played for me in the NFL, but I told him I have to talk to my head coach about him. “So I went to my head coach, and asked if I could sign this guy as a free agent. The head coach wanted to know about the player, and I told him, ‘he played for me, he has talent, he’s a good athlete, he works hard …’ — all those things that you want to hear about a player. I told Coach that he’d play for the league minimum, too. So Coach told me to talk to the guy’s college coach. I called him up, and came back. I told Coach that the guy’s college coach had said the same kind of things: ‘talented guy, worked hard, went to class, never got in trouble — good kid.’ Coach told me to call the guy’s high school coach, who told me this was the best player he’d ever coached. When I took that back to my head coach, he asked me to find out if the guy had played Pop Warner ball. I found his Pop Warner coach, and he told me they had named their old field after the guy. “The moral to all this — what the head coach was showing me — is that good professional players, for the most part, were always good players. It seems like everyone wants to find a guy from a small school that nobody has ever heard of, that diamond in the rough. There’s a reason those guys are so hard to find: there aren’t many of them, because most of the guys with the talent to play in the NFL are the best players on their teams at a young age, so they go to the bigger schools. If you’re looking for players, you start at a Florida, an LSU, a USC, an Ohio State. “Every few years, the TV guys get all excited because a guy hasn’t played football for a long time, but he is a good athlete and looks the part — maybe a former basketball who’s 6-foot-8 and 250 pounds and can run. All of a sudden, he’s a hot-shot tight end prospect? The next Antonio Gates? No. He’s a basketball player who has some muscle on him, or maybe a basketball player who tried football. You can’t just project guys because of how tall and heavy and strong they are. If you could, the league would be full of Scandinavian offensive linemen who can bench press an iceberg and wide receivers who can win Olympic medals in the 100-yard dash. There’s a difference between great athletes and great football players. The ones who make scouts look like geniuses are the ones who fall into both categories, but you don’t find them at small schools in the fifth round. There’s a reason those guys go in the first round, and teams trade up to get them." http://dal.scout.com/2/963770.html
