Let's spend a little more time decreasing the mystery surrounding NFL scouts. I think humanizing the business makes it a little easier to understand.

 

Where do scouts come from?:  Scouts come from a lot of places. Some (not as many as you'd think) are ex-NFL players. Most played at least some college ball, though this is less common than it used to be. Many are ex-college coaches that knew someone and got their break that way. Many are family members of someone in team ownership. However, the thing to understand is that scouts are getting younger and younger, and making less and less money (usually around $50,000-$60,000 for a first-year scout), and that's because teams see scouts as replaceable. If you're interested, here's a look at what scouts make based on experience. The trend now is centralized decision-making, and teams are asking their low-level scouts to go out and gather information like 40 times, stats and criminal histories, then let the GM and his inner circle form opinions and make evaluations. They don't want opinions from their area scouts as much as they want cold, hard facts. Though this is still just a trend and not the rule, it's gaining traction as more teams take a 'sports analytics'/'Moneyball' approach to evaluation. That's made scouting, which has always been subjective, an even more inexact science despite the fact that everyone on the Internet, it seems, is evaluating players today. But this trend also has a big impact on scouts' job security.

 

Job security: As we mentioned, a lot of teams see scouts as almost dispensable, and that's why a team usually brings in a new scout on a sort of three-year probationary period. If he doesn't seem to 'get it,' or maybe isn't thorough enough, or doesn't click with his boss, he may be tossed aside. "Players will wash out somewhere around the three-year mark," Murphy said. "Scouts are the same way. There typically will be a good year, a down year, and hopefully by the third year they have evened out and settled into their role." There are also 'regime changes' that cost scouts their jobs. The last few years, there has been almost as much turnover among general managers as there has been among head coaches. To a GM, the scouting staff is almost comparable to a head coach's coaching staff. In other words, there are people he's comfortable working with, and he wants to surround himself with them. That's why every May, right after the draft, there are hundreds of changes to team's scouting staffs.  Here are the changes in scouts (firings, hirings, promotions and demotions) that have taken place since this year's NFL draft.   Here are last year's. We've tracked all the scouting changes for seven years now.

 

No right or wrong answers: There's a perception that there's a 'black-and-white' nature to scouting, and that a good scout, if given the chance, can see obvious flaws that diminish a player, or big pluses that show that a player has talent and potential. Nothing could be further from the truth. Evaluation is a function of a player's talent, of course, and his pure physical ability, but also the skills and experience level of the scout evaluating him; how his school used him; how his head coach or position coach felt about him; NFL team needs; local affiliation; and at times even the personal histories of the scouts themselves. There's also a lot of luck involved. This is why you have to understand that if one team rates a player as marginal, that's just one of 32 opinions that count. There are a lot of reasons a team might not like a player, but just as many that a separate team may differ in its assessment. That's one reason selecting an agent that works hard for you is so important, but we'll address that later.