[Racehorse]

Originally Posted by Dam8610

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?

Another factor is what will sell where they are playing. What are the coaches looking for, and what is the organizational philosophy. What one franchise needs is different from another one. Fan bases expect a certain quality for their team. For example, Pitt players and Cheats players are somewhat different.