Today, our campus begins to welcome students back for the Fall semester.  One week from today, classes begin, for the most part, with face-to-face instruction for the first time since mid-March. A lot of time, energy, and resources were spent over the last several months by many well-intentioned people to get to this point.  Classrooms were redesigned to maximize social distancing.  Policies were put in place to try to minimize the likelihood of getting sick. Even dining was reconfigured to accommodate students (Hi, CNN).

If people wash their hands, wear masks, and socially distance this may very well work.  So, what is the issue? 

This spring, Netflix had the "reality" show, "Too Hot to Handle."  In the vein of such dating shows as Love Island and Temptation Island (sadly, I know all these shows exist), several twenty-something, attractive single men and women were brought together in a tropical setting for the chance to find true love.  They gather and mingle and sparks begin to fly.  However, a virtual assistant named "Lana," the inexplicable "host" of the show, suddenly informs them they can split a $100,000 prize (though it was unclear how it was to be split) if they make it four weeks.  The catch - NO PHYSICAL CONTACT.  Every intimate act that occurs reduces the overall prize pool (and they don't know what each act "costs.)" A kiss? $3,000 deducted from the overall pot.  Something more....?

With $100K on the line, how long do you think you could last? How long do you think those contestants lasted before penalties were incurred?  For two of the cast members, they didn't make it through the night before violating the rules.

 
For our small, liberal arts college of 2,000 or so students (though we are expecting smaller numbers given the environment), we are suddenly expecting 18-22-year-olds, many of whom who have been quarantined for 5+ months to continue to take appropriate measures to ensure that face-to-face instruction continues. 

In the last week alone, there have been 28 cases of COVID-19 at the University of Tennessee-Knoxville. A Oklahoma State University sorority house is now under quarantine after 23 members test positive for the coronavirus. The University of Alabama AD tweets a photo of locals gathering at bars without distancing and patrons not wearing masks.  The University of North Carolina had their fourth(!) cluster of cases; the student newspaper is none too pleased. The list goes on.

So, count me as a little bit leery we make it through the fall semester without seeing a repeat of spring.

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. 

“Technology is seductive when what it offers meets our human vulnerabilities. And as it turns out, we are very vulnerable indeed. We are lonely but fearful of intimacy. Digital connections and the sociable robot may offer the illusion of companionship without the demands of friendship. Our networked life allows us to hide from each other, even as we are tethered to each other. We’d rather text than talk.” ~ Sherry Turkle, ― Alone Together: Why We Expect More from Technology and Less From Each Other

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.  

I'm heading to Las Vegas in two weeks with a few of the 8 Man Rotation folk (Kris Dunn, Steve Boese, Lance Haun) to take in a couple days of NBA Summer League action.  Worth revisiting this July 2013 post.  If you're in the area, come join us.
 
On July 13-16, I will join three of my colleagues behind the 8 Man Rotation in Las Vegas (we always leave one behind to keep it going in case something befalls the rest of us) for two to three days to catch some NBA Summer League action.
Why do we want to head to the desert in summer time to spend 8-10 hours a day in a gym watching exhibition basketball when those games don't matter?
 
Because, in actuality, the games DO matter....for those playing.   In his piece on Grantland, Steve McPherson describes what it is like for those involved:

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.

• Not enough actionable content.  Schedule yourself better.  The program comes out early.  The presentations are available for download ahead of time. There are not a lot of surprises. The SHRM blog squad put out 150+ posts during the conference.  The SMART stage and the #Take10 sessions provided a ton of great content.  The twitter stream was a blur. There were 900+ exhibitors ready to answer your specific questions.  You had 18,000 peers that you could have approached and bounced ideas off of. If you couldn't find actionable content, you were not looking hard enough. Further, the RFP for the 2018 conference is due July 15. If you think you can do better, prove it. 
• Lines were super long for the bathroom.  Yes, they were.  Yet, many of the men's bathrooms were annexed and became women's bathrooms. Do you have a better solution? Should they cap attendance?
• Events started at 7:00 am, and I was tired from the night before.  Go to bed earlier.  They've had 7:00 sessions every year I've attended since 2001.  The game is the game. 
• There were not snacks at mid-morning or mid-afternoon.  Are you pre-schoolers?  Is it the responsibility of SHRM to feed you 24/7?  Pack some snacks to take with you.
• Lunch was mediocre.  You were warned.
• I had to wait in line for the buses.  The schedule is posted well in advance.  If you want to be closer to the convention center, book your room now (or when housing opens again in November).
• Long walk to get to sessions/sessions were full.  Yep. Leave earlier. Do you have a better solution?
• SHRM board members get prime seats at sessions.  Yes they do. Perk of the job. Want better seats? Get to the general session earlier.  Should SHRM start selling prime seats as add-ons to the conference registration?
• Wi-fi sucked.  Yes, it did.  It was frustrating.  You survived. 

A very advanced form of lie detector that measures contractions of the iris muscle and the presence of invisible airborne particles emitted from the body. The bellows were designed for the latter function and give the machine the menacing air of a sinister insect. The VK is used primarily by Blade Runners to determine if a suspect is truly human by measuring the degree of his empathic response through carefully worded questions and statements.