There is likely no organization that has more information about selecting its employees than the National Football League's collection of 30 teams. They have hours of game tape where they can witness their potential future employees actually perform; a rigorous scouting, observation, and interview process to prioritize their options.  Yet, even with almost every built-in advantage, teams miss all the time. QB Tom Brady was passed over several times before being selected in the sixth round of the NFL draft. History is rife of "can't miss" players drafted in the top 10 picks flaming out.

As of this morning, the Mid American Conference has canceled its fall football season.  The Big Ten and Pac-10 are on the verge of canceling theirs as well.  The impact on NFL teams is likely to be far reaching.  Let's explore a few:

1.  What does a NFL draft look like in 2021?

For most NFL teams, draft picks are like gold.  With only 7 rounds, they are, for the most part, scarce items.    They represent opportunity: to fill a position of need...as leverage in a trade...to improve the quality of one's team.  First and second round picks are even more valuable as they are one's you can least afford to gamble on.  

There are certainly some players that are locks for the first round regardless of whether the college football season occurs or not.  There is enough information available for teams to make a reasonable assessment of their qualities. However, how far into the pool of available players do questions about quality begin to arise?  Without a season of play, teams are more likely to whiff on any single pick, and teams may emphasize volume rather than

Confounding matters is the likelihood that many players will retain their eligibility for another year, and choose to stay on campus to improve their stock.  Take LSU QB Joe Burrow, for example.  He was seen as a late round pick at the beginning of the 2019 season.  A National Championship and Heisman Trophy later, Burrow was the #1 pick in the 2020 NFL draft.  Meanwhile, Georgia QB Jake Fromm was projected to a 1st round lock heading into last season, and ended up a fifth round pick.  How many current college players think they will be the next Joe Burrow by returning to college for another season?  And, how many view Fromm as a cautionary tale?

2. Scouting becomes more critical...or does it?

Joel A. Erickson of the Indianapolis Star writes “I’ll tell you this, scouts now become more important,” Indianapolis general manager Chris Ballard said. “Let’s say the disaster happens, and we’re evaluating all of last year’s tape. It’s going to take real work and real skill to get that done.”   

“This is where your connections as a scout become very important, because if you can’t get on the road, you have to have enough connections where you are able to pick up the phone and really dig and call, and people have to trust you to really give you the accurate information,” Ballard said.

However, Jason La Canfora of CBSSports.com finds this won't be easy: 

Even if NCAA teams were only going to practice and not play games until the spring, the front office people I have been talked to figured that sending scouts on campus to try to talk to these players and see them up close would be a moot point. It's always looked like diminishing returns to them, and rethinking how they evaluate players has long been in order. 

"These campuses are going to be closed to outsiders for the most part and some won't even really be open at all," said one NFC personnel exec. "And we're going to have guys going all over the country watching them up close and talking to them and watching film in their facilities? I can't see it. We aren't planning on it. I just don't see that happening."

3. "Buy or Make?"

Companies often have to decide whether to choose workers who already have the skills necessary to be competent immediately or invest in developing lesser-skilled employees. With so many unknowns in the draft, does this give leverage to upcoming free agents in improving the team.

One also has to consider the ripple effect of no season.  Not only is the college season possibly being canceled (or delayed until spring), but many high school sports have been put on the backburner as well.  How much development is going to occur during this lost season? Will there be a log jam at many colleges as players return, particularly with scholarship limitations; there is only so much room at the inn.

The Green Bay Packers were much maligned for moving up in the draft to select QB Jordan Love, when All-Pro Aaron Rodgers still may have several productive seasons remaining.  Instead, the Packers staff may have been prescient in seeing an unpredictable QB market over the next several years due to the market and wanted a more known commodity.

4. People analytics has its time to shine

With reduced game tape, and scouting possibly being limited, using data may be the best way for organizations to find inefficiencies in the market for players.  People analytics will become that much more critical for NFL teams to find that diamond in the rough, or to avoid taking on a player who is on the decline. 

These are guys who have worked their entire lives to be one of the 450 players in the top basketball league in the world. Guys who spent their whole lives being one of the best basketball players in any situation they ever found themselves in. And now it’s just the grind. They’re simply looking for their shot.

The ones hoping for that shot are almost universally flawed in one way or another: undersized or stuck between positions; not good enough at one specific thing to be useful to a team; dogged by problems we can’t even see, the kind of stuff many of us carry around.........

But for these players — who are among the top one or two percent of basketball players in the world — it’s their big chance. Not to become something they’re not, but to see their years of work turn them into what they’ve always been striving toward.

In the process of putting together a roster, the draft is just the beginning — every club must look to outside sources to fill out the rest of the squad. The day-to-day task of accounting for injuries and suspensions, filling holes and adding depth, and keeping the team as competitive and talented as possible falls under the purview of the less famous and less understood counterpart to the college scouting team: the pro personnel department and its cadre of scouts. 

Before pro scouts can even start to look to outside options — free agents, guys on the street, or potential trade targets — it’s essential to evaluate each and every player already on the roster, from the top down.

The duty for every pro personnel department is to create and manage a database of every player in the NFL, every signable player without a team, and a number of players from lower-level or international leagues. The term “no stone left unturned” is probably a motto for more than one team.

“You’re gonna be scouting the CFL, the arena league,” said Dan Hatman, who worked in personnel departments for the Giants, Eagles, and Jets who is now a director at The Scouting Academy. “When the UFL and XFL were around, [we scouted those leagues, too]. Anybody that’s not college eligible. We’d go through as many of those players as humanly possible — in addition to grading all 32 teams’ rosters every single year — so you constantly have updated grades on everybody who’s in the league.”

The initial impression may be that when disaster struck for both of these teams [Detroit Lions and Philadelphia Eagles], the subsequent moves were desperate and random. But while it’s certain that neither squad wanted to have to turn to free agency and trades to address newly created roster needs, their reactions were neither arbitrary nor panicked. These moves were the result of months, and in some cases, years of scouting, evaluation, and contingency-plan preparation, and both teams were able to act quickly to deal with the loss of key players because of the behind-the-scenes work of the pro scouting departments to build what’s frequently called a “short list,” “ready list,” or “emergency list.”

To keep the ready and/or emergency lists properly updated, teams typically work out a group of free-agent players every Tuesday, when the rest of the team has a day off. “We’re bringing in guys off the ready list or bringing in guys as favors to agents,” Hatman said. “Say you’ll have an agent call and say, ‘Hey, I’ve got this guy who’s bugging me because he hasn’t worked out for a team for a while. Can you bring him in and work him out?’ He does that because every workout goes on the transaction record, and it’s one of those things. ‘Oh, you know, X, Y, and Z worked him out. Now we gotta go look at him. We gotta vet him.’ That’s what every department does.”

 

For some teams, the pro personnel team becomes almost an HR department. “When I became a director, I thought it was really important that I was around the team,” McCartney said. “I went to practice every day, I watched, I was around the players, I knew what the issues were. The outside world has no idea what’s going on in the inside of an NFL building a lot of the time. I think people would be shocked to learn how many issues there can be that they would never in a million years hear about. A football player has a mental breakdown. A guy’s struggling at home in a relationship, and some guys can manage that, others can’t. It’s relationships. They’re people. People have problems.”

These problems can affect a player’s availability during the week or on Sundays, and the team, at times, must make roster changes to account for that. “There’s all kinds of little things like that,” McCartney said, “and [teams] must strike balance between the short term and the long term.”

This cycle goes on year after year. And it’s always changing and evolving with new coaches, new players, new schemes, and new pro personnel. The methodologies, the scouting reports, and the ready lists must be continually updated and improved.  

• Extremely successful career with numerous iconic roles (Carl Spackler, John Winger, Phil Summers...the list goes on)
• Rich many times over 
• Enough cachet and mystique that he can do almost anything and can get away with it because "no one will ever believe you."  My friends and I have our own Bill Murray encounter at the Bears-Packers NFC Championship game highlighted in the picture taken above (story here).

These are guys who have worked their entire lives to be one of the 450 players in the top basketball league in the world. Guys who spent their whole lives being one of the best basketball players in any situation they ever found themselves in. And now it’s just the grind. They’re simply looking for their shot.

The ones hoping for that shot are almost universally flawed in one way or another: undersized or stuck between positions; not good enough at one specific thing to be useful to a team; dogged by problems we can’t even see, the kind of stuff many of us carry around.........

But for these players — who are among the top one or two percent of basketball players in the world — it’s their big chance. Not to become something they’re not, but to see their years of work turn them into what they’ve always been striving toward.

Chambers and offensive lineman Matt Allen (Hinsdale, Ill.) were MSU's only commitments at that point. Now the class stands at 12 verbals, is ranked in the top 10 nationally by every major recruiting service and appears poised for more prominent additions soon.

Receiver Donnie Corley (Detroit King), safety Kenney Lyke (Palatine, Ill.) and defensive ends Josh King (Darien, Ill.) and Auston Robertson (Fort Wayne, Ind.) are among the celebrated targets close to decisions and viewed as MSU leans by some analysts. Some may have privately chosen MSU already.

That was the case with deWeaver, long before his announcement. And all who pick the Spartans are added to an ongoing group text deWeaver started. That's where the "real" talk happens, not on the Twitter account.

"It seems like we're adding people to it every night," deWeaver said.

"I think people are not talking enough about the big story here, the group text message that is going on," said Steve Wiltfong, national recruiting analyst for 247Sports.com. "The Twitter account, other people do that and that is what people see publicly, but this is different. You want to go to college with people you enjoy being around. I believe recruiting is a game of inches, and this is another way Michigan State is capitalizing on every inch right now."

This kind of communication helping committed prospects recruit others "has predecessors," said Josh Helmholdt of Rivals.com, but "Michigan State is in the mold where they're perfecting it."

USA Today reported the Guard spent $26.5 million to sponsor NASCAR in 2012, “but failed to sign up a single new soldier to its ranks,” according to Senate documents. Between 2011 and 2013, the Guard spent $88 million, but “it is unclear how many new recruits, if any, signed up because of it.”

“How can you justify the fact that nobody is getting recruited?” said Sen. Claire McCaskill (D-Mo.) in hearings. “The facts speak for themselves. The data is very clear. You’re not getting recruits off of NASCAR.”

The Guard received 24,800 recruiting prospects from the program in 2012, documents show. In those cases, potential recruits indicated the NASCAR affiliation prompted them to seek more information about joining. Of that group, only 20 met the Guard's qualifications for entry into the service, and not one of them joined. 

In 2013, the number of prospects associated with NASCAR dropped to 7,500, according to briefing materials for the Senate subcommittee on Financial and Contracting Oversight led by McCaskill. The National Guard needs 1 million leads to meet its annual recruiting goal of 50,000 soldiers.

"The Army, the Navy, the Marines and the Coast Guard all canceled their sponsorships with NASCAR due to cost, ineffectiveness and difficulty in measuring results," according to the briefing document. "The Army specifically stated that NASCAR was declining against the Army's core target audience and that NASCAR sponsorship had the highest cost per engagement in the Army's portfolio of sponsorships — three times the next highest program."

About one-third of NASCAR's audience is aged 18-35, the Guard's target audience for recruiting, according to the document.

These are guys who have worked their entire lives to be one of the 450 players in the top basketball league in the world. Guys who spent their whole lives being one of the best basketball players in any situation they ever found themselves in. And now it’s just the grind. They’re simply looking for their shot.

The ones hoping for that shot are almost universally flawed in one way or another: undersized or stuck between positions; not good enough at one specific thing to be useful to a team; dogged by problems we can’t even see, the kind of stuff many of us carry around.........

But for these players — who are among the top one or two percent of basketball players in the world — it’s their big chance. Not to become something they’re not, but to see their years of work turn them into what they’ve always been striving toward.

The Chicago Bulls are expected to pursue Carmelo Anthony in free agency. They just shouldn't expect Derrick Rose to participate in the recruiting.

Rose told Yahoo Sports on Sunday that he doesn't plan to recruit Anthony – or any free agent, for that matter – even though he likes Anthony's game and thinks they can play alongside each other.

Rose's reason is simple: He said it's "not his job."

"My thing is if they want to come, they can come," Rose said.

According to several sources, including a teammate, Noah's All-Star Weekend “conversation'' with New York Knicks standout Carmelo Anthony didn't end in New Orleans. They had discussions via text the rest of the season, including the day after the Bulls were eliminated in the playoffs by the Washington Wizards.

“I was kidding Jo that they were boys now,'' a source said in a phone interview Friday. “ ‘Well, get your boy to come to Chicago.' ''

Sources said Noah has been in Anthony's ear as often as possible, and he has told other Bulls to push hard for Anthony this summer. But there is one condition: Backup big man Taj Gibson can't be sacrificed.

1. How do you not hedge (i.e. if you pick MSU to win it all against Michigan) by placing a bet on Michigan just in case?  Would your mortgage your house?   What kind of loan could you possibly get to bet against your pick (just to be safe)?  1 million? 5 million? 10 million? More?
2. Would you offer every player on Michigan several million dollars to throw the game?

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one reason the league acted fast was to immediately enhance its ability to monitor referees — always a touchy subject. The cameras represent the most precise way to grade the three on-court officials based on how consistently and early they get into the league’s three set positions — called “lead,” “slot,” and “trail” — and whether they make appropriate calls from those positions based on their exact sight lines. This is the next stage in seeing which officials are the best, and thus deserving of high-stakes assignments, and in quantifying that in ways that are hard to dispute.

The league has already started using the cameras to check on the enforcement of defensive three-second violations out of concern that defensive players routinely break the rule by lingering in the lane too long. (The results of said studies are inconclusive so far, say several sources familiar with the inquiry.)

"LISTEN, KID! I've been hearing that crap ever since I was at UCLA. I'm out there busting my buns every night. Tell your old man to drag Walton and Lanier up and down the court for 48 minutes" 

Teams can pay up to $40,000 extra to purchase (among other goodies) software that helps track a player’s physical exertion. The in-game cameras represent one piece of that. They can tell you how fast a player runs, how often he accelerates on cuts, how often those accelerations end with him reaching top speed, and the height of a player’s release point on jump shots. Some players recovering from injury, including Ricky Rubio last season, have taken significant game time to get back to their previous speed and fitness baselines. And an injury to one star, Manu Ginobili early in the 2011-12 season, resulted in the other San Antonio starters exerting more physical effort with a standstill shooter (Danny Green) in Ginobili’s place.

The other pieces, and perhaps the most important ones in determining a player’s condition, come outside those 82 games and require the use of other forms of technology: sleep and heart-rate monitors, GPS devices and accelerometers players can wear during practice, and the careful tracking of weightlifting, diet, and other day-to-day stuff. Put all that data together, and you can get a fairly complete picture of a player’s condition, and of how indicators of his condition — running speed, jumping ability, etc. — change over the course of a season. “This is where you can start to measure fatigue,” says Brian Kopp, executive vice-president at STATS.

A revealing nugget: Teams really want the SportVU cameras to monitor their practices, Kopp says. That’s difficult, since most teams practice somewhere other than their game arenas. Some coaches and GMs might want the practice data simply to check on which players work hard, and which loaf.

But others will want it to change the very concept of practice. How much practice time do teams really need? And how taxing should those practices be? How should that change during the season? There are higher-ups around the league who are ready to radically rethink these things, provided the next-level data indicates they should.

So imagine a player entering the final year of his rookie-scale contract and his agent beginning contract talks only to hear a team official open with something like, “Our camera data shows you really don’t hustle in the fourth quarter. Your running speed slows down. You just stand around instead of going for rebounds. These are some of the reasons we are offering you only $7 million per year.”

Wouldn’t that agent want to at least cross-check that data, to make sure it’s not B.S.? The players union has already started the fight for access to that data. “All we want is to make sure access is available,” says Ron Klempner, the union’s executive director. “If teams are forming impressions about players that players are not in position to defend, we want to make sure everyone is operating on an even scale.”