I did my sleuthing on East Coast time, traveling the King’s Highway in the middle of the night, getting in before 5 A.M., and working the phones from one of the back meeting rooms. Spiral notebook open before me, I called possible sources, throwing the 49ers name around in hopes that it would loosen lips. More often than not, it did. From guidance counselors and coaches alike, the information flowed. I made and received calls all day long. Each time I hung up, the phone would ring again. I always answered, because I knew that if Walsh had the right information, he would make the right decision. Somewhere in my stuffed notebook I was going to have the right information. A little surprisingly, Brown emerged as the clear local hero. He was revered at Miami High School, eliciting raves from coaches who worked with him and faced him. His athleticism and quickness were awe-inspiring. The Bengals thought so, too. That is why, after the Jets took Toon with the tenth overall pick, they grabbed Brown with the thirteenth, leaving us with Rice. He worked out pretty well, I think we’d all have to agree, but who knows what kind of a name Brown could have made for himself in the NFL if he had dropped into our laps.
Another background area that Davis taught Walsh to care about was track and field experience. Davis was forever on the lookout for 100-meter champions from states he deemed “fast,” such as California, Florida, Lousiana, and Texas. (Impressive times from places such as Minnesota didn’t carry the same weight because Davis assumed they were wind-aided.) Davis, by the way, also was obsessed with shot-putters, discus throwers, and state wrestling champs: athletes who displayed rare balance, great footwork, and explosive power. This scouting “cheat” had led the 49ers to Jeff Stover, the University of Oregon’s Pac-10 shot-put champ, whom Walsh called the most consistent lineman on San Francisco’s 1984 Super Bowl–winning team.
One of my all-time favorite Al Davis stories is also a cautionary tale about the imperfect science of player evaluation. In 1981 Davis selected Texas Tech cornerback Ted Watts with the twenty-first pick. When he finally got to meet Watts, Davis stuck out his hand and said, “Ah, the fastest man in Florida.” To which Teddy replied, “Yeah, thank God that white boy slipped out of the blocks and pulled his hamstring.” Davis was brought up so short that he almost pulled his own hamstring. He had made his pick on false pretenses. That white boy, it turns out, was Cris Collinsworth, who recently was named one of the top 50 Bengals of all time. Watts’s NFL career never made it out of the starting blocks. He started just 22 games with the Raiders.
Walsh’s first toe dip into the track and field pool didn’t go much better. Renaldo Nehemiah, a favorite to win gold in the high hurdles at the 1980 Olympics until the American boycott took away his chance, didn’t even play college football. But his breathtaking athleticism got him several NFL tryouts before the Niners signed him. Walsh tried desperately to mold Nehemiah into a receiver, but it was clear almost immediately that he just didn’t have any instincts on a football field. After three years and only 43 catches, Nehemiah was out of San Francisco and back on the track.
Brown’s stellar high school background and Nehemiah’s mesmerizing physical presence on the track were proof that you can’t judge a prospect on just one or two parameters no matter how incredible he may seem. A proper, successful evaluation has to include dozens of factors, countless hours of film study, and real-time confirmation from as many sets of eyes as possible.
If you ask me, Davis’s most important lesson in scouting was this: Focus on the level of competition. It seems obvious now, but Davis was one of the first to understand the huge variation of talent in college—from program to program and conference to conference—and how not being able to compare apples to apples could severely affect draft evaluations. Davis was drawn to players who were at their best against the best. That was why he (and in turn Walsh and eventually almost the entire NFL) loved all-star games, especially the Senior Bowl. In fact, the Raiders would always begin their draft preparations the same way every year: with the complete scouting and coaching staffs in a room and Davis himself armed with the remote control and videotape of the Senior Bowl.
Senior Bowl week in Alabama offered insight that wasn’t available during any other college visit. For starters, there’s just no place to hide against competition that good. And if a player performed a skill once in such elevated company, coaches assumed that they could get him to replicate that in the pros. We looked at how quickly players learned new techniques and, most of all, how much they improved in the week leading up to the game. If a player could get better in four days, it was a safe bet he would take much bigger strides once he was being tutored full-time in the league.
Davis’s idea about watching players compete against those at the highest level remains the key to effective personnel evaluation. Usually, the NFL teams with the lowest winning percentage in the previous season are given the opportunity to coach at the Senior Bowl (if they haven’t been fired, that is). Just a couple of years ago that was the Dallas Cowboys. One of the players on their team was a young quarterback from Mississippi State. Dak Prescott had a distinguished college career, but questions lingered about his ability to adapt to the pro game, his football intelligence, and his overall skill level. After a week with Prescott at the Senior Bowl, though, the Cowboys had answers and insight on a quarterback prospect that no other NFL team could obtain. Armed with that information, they were able to secure a potential franchise quarterback with a fourth-round pick, the NFL equivalent of winning the Powerball.
I’m pretty sure I know exactly how Al, were he still alive, would feel about America’s Team using his methods to find a marquee quarterback.
* * *
—
In 2003 Michael Lewis released Moneyball, the story of Oakland Athletics general manager Billy Beane’s quest to gain an advantage for his revenue-poor baseball team with an outside-the-box analytical approach. In the book, Lewis explains the biases inherent in traditional baseball scouting. In his latest work, The Undoing Project, he delves deeper into the systematic biases of human decision making. In particular, he writes about confirmation bias, which holds that the human mind is just plain bad at seeing things it doesn’t expect to see and a bit too eager to see what it wants to. Confirmation bias is absolutely insidious in my field even though it breaks the first rule of scouting: Never begin with the end in mind.
Most of the time we don’t even realize it is occurring. Evaluators get caught up in groupthink, settle on an opinion about a prospect, and then arrange the evidence to support it, sometimes for years. Biases in scouting are the main reason many NFL teams fail to make substantial progress in the standings from one season to the next.
Certain coaches, for instance, have a particular weak spot for players with “football intelligence” and let that overshadow actual talent level. More than a few players have survived in the league by knowing a team’s systems cold even when they lack the physical tools to actually make a play when it matters. I call those guys “bus drivers” because they can master the route to the stadium perfectly but can’t do anything once they’ve arrived. When the game begins, they’re stuck in park and have little effect on the outcome. Bus drivers make me crazy.
It’s not just coaches who get fooled; personnel staffers can be mesmerized by biases as well. Blame the “card player.” During game weeks, pro scouting executives watch practice squaders and other inactive players as they mimic the opposing offense or defense in drills. These scout team players are shown a card for their assignment and then execute it. They play fast because they don’t have to think; they just do. Alas, this is not always an accurate indicator of their worth because it’s assignment-free, pressure-free football, like the touch game you played in the backyard, with routes traced on the back of the quarterback’s hand.
The greatest card player of all time—the man for whom the term was coined in 1991—was John Thornton, a defensive lineman from the University of Cincinnati (not to be confused with the John
Thornton who played at West Virginia and later for the Cincinnati Bengals). John Earvin Thornton Jr., a college free agent nose tackle, had a typical-for-those-days nose tackle body—like a Coke machine. He was not an instinctive player, but at 6'3" and 300 pounds he could bull his way forward because he was stronger than almost everyone else. As a member of the Cleveland Browns practice squad, he was supposed to imitate the opposing defensive linemen. In practice he’d glance at the card for his alignment and path, then reenact whatever the card told him to do. Playing off the card, he was incredible and virtually impossible to block. So incredible, in fact, that we activated him off the practice squad. Big mistake. Once the game was live and the chess pieces started moving, Thornton had to think for himself. And when he was forced to rely on instincts and awareness of the scheme, he was far from the force we had hoped for. It was as if he were moving in slow motion, the easiest guy to block on the field. He lasted five games before we released him. But it was worth it, I suppose, because we learned something important about our own biases: Card players and football players are two very different things.
The second destructive form of bias we see all the time in NFL team building is “scouting blinders”: whenever drafted players are kept around long after it has become obvious that the evaluation that got them where they are was dead wrong. Like many crimes, the cover-up is even worse than the initial mistake. When it came to players Al Davis discovered, there was no like, only love, and when he loved, he loved forever. Everyone in the Raiders front office called it “the scholarship.” In 2001 we claimed Chad Slaughter, a 6'8" offensive tackle, from the Jets. (Normally, Davis hated to claim players from other teams because it gave the appearance, accurate or not, that other teams were better than his.) Slaughter was with us from 2001 until 2006, the longest stay he had with any team, but when it was time to redo his deal, I offered the minimum, because that was what he was worth. His agent, though, knew he was one of Al’s favorite finds and held out for more. Smart. I eventually overpaid because, honestly, giving the money away beat having to deal with a belligerent Davis if we lost one of his scholarship players.
In 2014, the Jacksonville Jaguars drafted Central Florida quarterback Blake Bortles in the first round of the draft. He was the prize selection of Jags general manager David Caldwell, his first after being given complete authority to run the team. No matter how Bortles plays, though, Caldwell refuses to view him in a negative light. At this point that’s actually quite an amazing feat. In spite of Bortles’s losing career record, not to mention some of the worst fundamentals I’ve ever seen in a pro quarterback (and, yes, I saw what he did for Jacksonville in 2017; call me unconvinced), Caldwell has had difficulty removing his blinders because he doesn’t want to believe he was wrong. In situations like this, GMs almost always blame coaches rather than players.
Love is blind in most NFL front offices, and the destruction caused by it gets compounded when the object of affection is the leader of the team. You can’t bullshit an NFL locker room. Everybody on every team knows who the good players are, who the bad players are, and who the team’s favorite (a.k.a. untouchable) players are. The best teams force players to prove their value. They don’t give—or save—jobs on the basis of draft status. As a result, when a head coach stands in front of his team and supports a player—quarterback or otherwise—who doesn’t deserve it, the rest of the players are almost assuredly mumbling their doubts under their breath to one another, and this lack of integrity and transparency erodes team chemistry faster than anything else in the game.
The truth is, you aren’t officially an NFL general manager until you’ve made a huge blunder on draft day. It’s just part of the gig. The best GMs just accept a mistake as a bad day at the office and move on. Bill Belichick will be the first to admit he blew it when he blows it, such as the year he selected Boston College defensive tackle Ron Brace in the second round, a pick Belichick calls his worst ever. Being able to talk about his mistakes—in Belichick speak: “I fucked that up”—makes it easier for him to hold honest discussions as a matter of course. And it is those discussions that minimize bad decision making.
Nate Silver’s popular website FiveThirtyEight has calculated the success ratio of every position in every round. Drafting a quarterback in the first two rounds has less than a 50 percent chance of succeeding, and with each round those odds dwindle. Overall, the chances of finding a franchise quarterback in any round is closer to 40 percent. There are few parts of the game in which the public’s perception of expertise and the actual data are further apart than in the NFL draft. Think about that FiveThirtyEight number for a second: With all the manpower and expertise that go into drafting the most critical position in professional sports, the experts still have a hard time beating a coin flip. You can blame a lot of things for why drafting is such an imperfect science, but in my mind, bias in the evaluation process is the biggest culprit. Making matters worse, bias-affected decisions inevitably snowball into a series of poor decisions that can bring down an entire team.
Have you seen A Simple Plan? It’s a movie that is all about how bias can compound an original mistake. Three characters come upon a crashed plane in the woods. Inside, they find a dead pilot and over $4 million. Their “simple plan”—take the money before reporting the crash—begins to unravel almost immediately. And with each new move they make, it falls even further apart. In the end, two of the three are dead and the lone survivor realizes the haul is worthless. Everyone loses. And all because they doubled down instead of cutting their losses.
The same thing happens in football front offices.
A draft-day crash won’t necessarily destroy a team. But sticking to a plan because of that disaster always will.
* * *
—
Character assessment is by far the hardest challenge for team builders. More than any other factor, inaccurate character assessment is why draft boards are to this day littered with so many mistakes. That’s never going to change, either, because there are so many variables involved. For starters, let’s be honest, there’s a sliding scale of morality in the NFL (as in every industry), in which the more talented an employee is, the more he can get away with. Each team has its own method for determining the risk/reward ratio for signing or keeping players with questionable character. In New England, for example, Belichick has established such a strong locker room chemistry that he can take risks on players with questionable character because he knows they will be policed by their new teammates.
Just as each team situation is different, there are myriad ways to define character. A player might not be a Boy Scout off the field or have what fans in general deem to be great moral character, but if he has “football” character—he practices hard, knows his assignments, isn’t a disruptive force in the locker room, and plays hurt—that’s far more important even if no one in the NFL would be caught dead admitting it.
Because there are so many factors in assessing player character, it comes down to a case-by-case study. That’s why proper scouting is so expensive and labor-intensive: Character can be assessed only face-to-face. A good example of this is when Belichick and I, representing the Browns, went into the 1996 Scouting Combine in Indianapolis hoping to learn more about two top prospects: Miami linebacker Ray Lewis and Nebraska running back Lawrence Phillips.
We had heard that, despite his lack of height and weight, Lewis was destined to be a star. No one had to train him to find the ball carrier; he knew where to go instinctively, usually a microsecond before anyone else. Lewis was also born to lead, to inspire others. A couple of months earlier, an assistant coach had attended Playboy’s Football All-America weekend at the Biltmore Hotel in Phoenix and come back with a glowing review: “He has an infectious personality that partied hard, played hard, and wants to win at everything he does, including Ping Pong,” this coach wrote. Attending that weekend virtually incognito allowed our coach to examine the players in their most n
atural moments. Prospects are like the rest of us; when they know someone is judging them, they tend to behave better. Lewis’s unguarded behavior passed every test. When I finally met Lewis at the Combine, he was precisely how the scout had described him in Phoenix: energetic and easy. Because we were the Browns, we had to beg and bribe (with free team swag) college players to come speak to us. But Lewis was happy to talk football and go over game tape, and he remembered the details of every game we watched together.
Phillips, in contrast, had all the physical gifts but a growing and well-documented reputation as a violent, unstable character risk. Still, just as we had confirmed our report on Lewis in person, we needed to see for ourselves and do our due diligence with Phillips. Well, however much enthusiasm Lewis showed in our meetings, Phillips was the exact inverse. He remembered nothing about games; not the name of the play, not the opponents, not even the thoughts behind the game plans. He seemed distracted, almost pissed, about being asked to sit with us and couldn’t have cared less that we had the fourth overall pick.
By the time our face-to-face Combine interviews concluded, Lewis had leaped up our draft board and Phillips had fallen off completely.
Of course, there is no ignoring Lewis’s subsequent connection to two stabbing deaths. In the end, he was convicted only of obstructing justice. I’m not giving him a pass, only the benefit of the doubt. What I know for sure is that, before and since, Lewis has carried himself with dignity, and on the field he was the consummate professional. But I also know enough to know there are no universal truths regarding character, no concrete lists of dos and don’ts, only a long string of independent anecdotes I’ve compiled over the years that confirm the importance of judging character on a player-by-player basis.
Gridiron Genius Page 8