Quote:
Originally Posted by Ironshaft
And that is the fatal flaw almost all of us have.
I play golf. I have played golf since my teenager years going on 35 years at this point. At one point in my late 20s, I held a 10 handicap on PGA rated courses which means I was a pretty good normal golfer but nowhere near good enough to try the pros.
I got to play one round with a pro at a pro-am (Brad Bryant) who in 1997 was the 81st ranked player on the PGA tour by money. That was the highest ranking he ever had on the tour. Sufficient to say, he was only a marginal PGA golfer.
As we played, we talked through his logic on each holes and the factors that he used to determine his landing zone. His understanding of the game was LIGHT YEARS better than mine. He considered factors that I did not even comprehend existed. The type of grass, how it was mowed, how the wind was folding the grass over, how the bunker was raked, his reading of the green was so much better than mine.
In 2012, I was a little league coach for my son's 5th/6th grade team. I coached the O-Line and the D-Line. I played both O-Line and D-Line through high school, attempted to walk onto a Big 10 football team and spent three weeks in summer practice with Purdue before being cut, have watched and studied O-Line and D-Line play for decades as a fan.
Before the season, I went to talk to the high school O-Line and D-Line coaches (two different folks) about how they wanted technique taught at our level to then filter up to the middle school and high school teams.
Again, night and day about their understanding of technique, footwork training drills and mindsets that mine. The depth of what they understood about what makes for a successful skillset and mindset was much deeper than mine.
I have been in my profession for 25 years. I get kids out of college all the time disagreeing with my logic and recommendations on how to do task completion only to come back a couple of weeks later asking for advice since their project is all messed up.
There is a light year difference in those who DO and those who WATCH.
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I understand your point, but I would counter with: scouts watch, same as us. Yes, understanding of the game is important, but there are ways to get that. The subtle nuances of the best handfighting techniques, how to engage and defeat a blocker (DL), or how to reestablish hands and reanchor once a rusher has successfully defeated hands or gotten the blocker off balance (OL) are in fact techniques and worries best left to the coaching staff to understand and develop in the player, I would 100% agree with that as a big part of their job is player development. But scouting is more like checking off boxes on a quality check. You want to see the good, the great, the bad, and the ugly to determine what you think a player can and can't do. Then you get testing numbers, and if something stands out as unexpected, you cross check again. Of course the NFL front offices get a deluge of information we just don't get access to, and I think the Colts' employment and deployment of Brian Decker is brilliant and necessary in the modern NFL. Obviously that additional information is going to change their evaluations some, probably mostly by taking some players off their board. To me, that is the biggest difference between pro scouting departments and people who learn it on their own. After all, there are independent NFL draft experts, and they get a lot of things right that the NFL gets wrong (of course it goes the other way as well). I'm not saying that I'm one of those, but there also has been crossover between NFL front offices and independent draft experts, so I guess the question would be where do you draw the line?
05-12-2021, 10:12 AM
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