How Scouts Try to Identify and Grade "Intangibles"

(How to) View Grit

NFL scouts spend hundreds of hours every year poring over tape to find an edge in the draft, but there’s one element that’s impossible to measure: intangibles. Here’s how the league’s evaluators try to crack the code for unquantifiable traits like poise, leadership, toughness, confidence, and, yes, grit.

From one year to the next, no team consistently fares better than the rest at picking winners in the NFL draft. It’s not unheard of for a franchise to go on a hot streak, landing multiple stars over a couple of offseasons, and there are certainly a few organizations that have proved to be dependably worse than average (sorry, Cleveland). But the draft remains a crapshoot.


That’s because while the old football adage the tape doesn’t lie is catchy, it clearly isn’t always true. Film is just one piece of the scouting puzzle; the rest is centered around, essentially, predicting the future. Scouting departments are tasked with not only projecting how a given prospect’s skill set translates against better competition at the pro level, but often how it will work in an entirely different scheme. On top of that, scouts must determine a player’s capacity for improvement, dig into his mental makeup, assess how he’ll deal with failure (and success), and decide how well he’ll fit into the culture of the locker room. Put simply, the hardest part of a scout’s job isn’t watching tape — it’s evaluating all the intangibles a player brings to the table.

Identifying and grading those hard-to-define traits can “make or break whether a scout is good at their job, and whether or not a team is good at finding players,” Mike McCartney, an an agent and former scout with the Bears and former director of pro personnel with the Eagles, told me. “It’s one person evaluating another person. All people are different, and they change.”

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[www.theringer.com]