“Stopwatches And Tape Measures: Evaluating Potential NFL Talent”
As an agent, your survival is predicated on getting new clients, and for those that want to be agents beyond a year or two, finding NFL talent that will make active rosters for more than a year. Each NFL team will fill their off-season roster with 90 players, but only 53 of those per team will make the team’s active roster in September, and agents can largely only bill and make money off a player’s active roster status. So, for an agent, no active roster players, no income.
So, as an agent you’re combing through collegiate rosters looking for who is going to make a roster so that you can stay practicing as an agent, pay your mortgage, pay back law school student loans, buy groceries, send your son to college, etc. But who do you sign? Who’s going to make it? Well, having a deep understanding how NFL teams (your future clients' future employers) grade and evaluate talent gives you a head’s up on the hundreds of other agents looking to do the same thing you’re doing.
Evaluation of players by teams can begin during a player’s underclass years, but for most, it begins in the spring before their senior year. There are two organizations: BLESTO and National Football Scouting (“the National”) where NFL teams can subscribe and share information early on about players in May every at meetings held in Florida. As teams work out Seniors at a college’s pro day, they begin also looking and potentially working out Juniors for the following year, and making assessments. Those initial grades and assessments are shared between subscribing teams, with a majority of NFL teams subscribing to the National, a few to BLESTO, and fewer yet independent of both. The National also organizes the NFL Scouting Combine every year in Indianapolis.

What are these teams looking for? Why do players that may not be well-known in college go on to be highly valued by NFL teams, and some that are well-known in college occasionally nominally valued? The answer to those questions is very case-by-case, but here are some things teams look at:
1. Level of competition, who are these players playing against every week?
2. Injuries, and the degree and frequency through out their career, even if currently healthy.
3. Height, weight, arm length, and their correspondence with optimal sizes in the NFL.
4. Consistency in technique and execution.
5. Their coaches' opinions of them as players and human beings, strength coaches, position coaches, etc.
6. Character and intelligence, criminal background checks are conducted as well as intelligence tests given.
7. Scheme the player plays in in college, and how much work a team is going to have to put into a player to get them up to speed.
8. Speed, explosion, strength, and agility on an elite level.
9. Mental make up, desire to play the game, toughness, ferocity, intangibles, etc.
There may be other factors, but it’s quite possible for a dominate collegiate player to not be valued high with this and other criteria, and for a lower producing collegiate player to get rave reviews by NFL scouts.
Teams send out scouts to the most remote corners of the country to look at players, and are aided by large travel budgets, thousands of hours of film study, and the direct opinions of a player’s college coaches, to understand who is likely to be a success at the next level and who won’t. Agents tap into these opinions and also learn how to do evaluations similar to these to understand who is going to be given a shot to succeed and who’s not. Is it a perfect science? No. But for every surprise success there are so many known failures-to be.

Players are assigned a preseason grade, which will change possibly during and after the collegiate season, based on further evaluation and will dictate who is invited to the NFL Combine after the season. This is where the majority of players that have lengthy careers in the NFL are evaluated in interviews, athletic and positional testing, and medical tests. This, a college’s Pro Day, a major all-star game, and private workouts and pre-draft visits form the basis for what any individual team will do or want to do with a player on draft day.
In closing, players are always being evaluated, and of the thousands that will hire an agent, only a select few hundred will actually be given a shot to actually make an NFL career for thenselves. This is something that is determined, at least in the initial stages, before a player even begins his Senior season.
Agents that know that this, and are able to find and sign and aid (regardless of what Draft boards or media say) players that NFL teams value, are those you see in the agent business beyond three years. Those that don’t … well the NFLPA certifies a hundred or more new agents every year for a reason.
