As a Canadian Football League scout specializing in watching American talent to add to our negotiation list, the process of acquiring players to bring to Winnipeg is both lengthy and involved.
After months of pouring over NCAA film, traveling to schools around the Northeastern United States and constructing extensive lists of potential CFL fits, the NCAA All-Star Event season arrives.
This year, my first All-Star Event was the Hula Bowl in Orlando, Florida in mid-January. Like most All-Star games, the Hula Bowl consists of three practices and a concluding game between over 100 athletes from around the NCAA, with each hoping to improve their pro prospects.
As a Blue Bombers scout at an NCAA All-Star event, the goal is to identify players who could develop into contributing members of our organization. To do that, one must first gain an understanding of what our coaches are looking for at each position and what type of players thrive in the CFL.
As loyal CFL fans well know, not every former NFL player can come into our league and set the world on fire. Certain archetypes of players perform better in the CFL than others due to the abundance of minor rule changes that make our game so unique and exciting. Other types of players, meanwhile, have not performed as well historically for myriad of reasons.
So, one of the first things that I must do when I attend an event such as the Hula Bowl is eliminate players who don’t fit what we are looking for early.
Some of the players are essentially eliminated from our consideration before we even attend the event. America players who play fullback, for instance, are not our primary focus because we play Canadians exclusively at fullback. So, if we see an American fullback on the roster who does not have the versatility to potentially switch positions, we can eliminate them from our watchlist.
As Day 1 at the Hula Bowl kicks off, nearly 100 scouts from the NFL, CFL, XFL, and USFL crowd into a hotel conference room at 8:30 a.m. to watch each participating player be weighed and measured.
Players have their heights and weights measured, but also have their hands, arms, and wingspans tallied as scouts furiously scribble or type out the results. This morning weigh-in, which lasted approximately two hours, is another opportunity for us to narrow our watch list down or key in on specific players.
It might be that a player weighs in much lighter or heavier than the typical threshold we feel is necessary for success in the CFL. Or maybe a player has an intriguing physical profile that makes us circle his name and want to take a closer look. While it may seem mundane to some to watch 100 football players walk onto a stage to be weighed and measured, every little detail we can find is written down and stored in our database.
After the weigh-in is over, there’s a few hours of down time for scouts prior to the first day of practice. Some scouts rush back to the hotel to take a quick nap, some grab a late breakfast, and others make last-minute preparations for their watchlist.
I decided to use my small bit of downtime to read a few chapters of a book that my sister bought me for Christmas – ‘Cinema Speculation’ by Quentin Tarantino.
After a few hours at the hotel, Blue Bombers Assistant GM/Director of U.S. Scouting Danny McManus and I headed to practice at the University of Central Florida’s practice facility at 1 p.m. With practices starting at 1:30, we use the 30 minutes or so beforehand to survey how the players interact with one another and chat with some other scouts who are quickly arriving at the field.
Each All-Star event splits their players into two separate teams that will practice during the week and play each other on game day. While many similar All-Star events have two practices back-to-back with a short break in between, the Hula Bowl instead has both practices going on simultaneously at adjacent fields. This makes it particularly difficult, because you are trying to evaluate so many players all at once, even after you’ve done some early eliminating.
With both practices happening at once, Danny and I split up duties, with each of us watching one team exclusively to maximize our capabilities. While the practice only lasts just over two hours, we return to the hotel afterward with pages of notes on the players who we had a close eye on.
As we make our short drive back to the hotel, we begin to share our observations from the day on players who stood out, for good or for bad reasons. Then we whittle down our watch lists even further, so that we can key in on players we feel need a closer look at on the following day.
Once back at the hotel, it’s time to watch game film of some of the players who had us intrigued. I open my laptop, fire up our film database, and spend the next several hours focusing on the players who stood out to me, or the players I need a closer look at for one reason or another.
Time flies when you’re watching film, and suddenly it’s time to grab dinner. Danny and I head over to a local spot that other scouts had recommended around 8 p.m., and a few other scouts meet with us to chat and swap stories.
After dinner wraps up, we mosey back over to the hotel and shift focus to the next day of practices. Danny and I plan to switch which teams we will be watching so that we can compare notes the next day and make sure we are on the same page with which players are the most ideal fits for our team.
Another big day awaits, and with it comes another opportunity to find the next great Blue Bomber.
Cyril Penn will be writing regularly for bluebombers.com through the spring, providing an inside look at some of the American prospects the club will be bringing to training camp.
