College football is the backbone of the professional game. It’s where the NFL gets its players, their ideas, and more than a handful of their coaches. It’s the NFL’s free little league that not only develops players, but also makes them so famous that they are the best of their superstars before attending a rookie minicamp. The NFL could, imaginably, be the $ 15 billion-a-year juggernaut it is at the moment if the college game did not exist, but no one in the league wants to invent it. Tuesday was not only an important moment for the college game, as two Power Five conferences scrapped their fall seasons. It represented a shift – perhaps a lasting one – for the pro.
Here’s what we know that – as with all things related to the COVID-19 pandemic – is constantly evolving and confusing: The Big Ten and Pac 12 will not be playing this fall. The other major conferences – the SEC, the ACC, and Big 12 plan to move forward with their seasons. Leading a season with non-professional players who are also students on a university campus is a risk, and how many games can be played by the conferences that have been pushed forward is unknown. The Athletic‘s Nicole Auerbach reported that a rare heart condition, myocarditis, found in patients who have COVID-19, has been discovered in several Big Ten athletes. “The conference is aware of at least 10 players having myocarditis, an alarmingly high number for an otherwise rare condition, on the eve of camp for press season,” Auerbach wrote. The biggest problem, a source told a Power Five conference Stadiums Brett McMurphy, “is the unknown long-term impact of COVID [and] involved issues with liability. ”These concerns have contributed to a wave of delays so far.
In conversations with NFL staff over the past week, it was difficult to find a corner of the sport that they did not think would be affected by these developments. Teams can refer to fellow coaches as advisors or analysts for pro schemes. College prospects will fall through the cracks of the NFL’s development system. More teams may trade packs to avoid a confusing draft cycle. I was on the phone Tuesday with an NFL general manager when the Big Ten announced the proposal. After I delivered the news, he let out a heavy sigh. Everything, we both knew, would change.
The most obvious change is the design: Even in the best-case scenario for player evaluation – which the SEC, ACC, Big 12, and some smaller conferences are pushing for – NFL evaluators will not miss a movie for hundreds of players. In addition, among the conferences still on course to play this fall, stars are already announcing that they intend to sit out. Defensive end Greg Rousseau is out for the season, even if his Miami Hurricanes are not.
“The most important thing is that we have already selected several guys, and the only thing we can check is that they will play football in 2019,” Titans general manager Jon Robinson said Friday. ‘We do spring scouting where we see last year’s film, whether these guys were juniors or redshirt sophomores, and go into their junior or senior years. Well, we saw three games on player A. We have time, so let’s go back and watch the whole season on that player. Maybe there’s a game as a series that will crystallize your evaluation or change your mind. “
Game tape is of valuable value to scouts and GMs, not only for the obvious reasons – to look at game perspectives – but for the nuances. Robinson, for example, likes to measure a player’s competitive ability by how he performs late in blowouts.
The current collective bargaining agreement calls for keeping the concept no later than June 2nd. That could be adjusted, especially if leagues like the Big Ten and Pac-12 try to play games from early 2021, but there’s no real reason to make much out of that date. The NFL will not slow down syn Season 2021, which is scheduled to begin training camp in July, and teams need to know who is on their roster then. Setting dates, the general consensus in the league is that there is no appetite for top prospects to play in the spring. If there is one spring football but the best players do not participate, it can be difficult for NFL teams to figure out how much legitimacy to lend it.
“This is going to be complicated,” Falcons general manager Thomas Dimitroff told me about the design cycle. In today’s NFL, a scout is a combination of an evaluator and a researcher, and the research site will now have to kick in high gear.
Dimitroff went on to say: “For scouts, it’s OK, let’s think about digging into research, evaluate any video you’ve not seen before. Most scouts have not seen whole seasons of underclassmen. The problem is that it does not get fresh for us. College scouting already requires projection, and now they will have to be even [bolder] in their projections. ”
The result will be a profoundly unfair evaluation process. Remember, at this point last year, Joe Burrow was not even on wire radars; until January he was a quick top scorer, a point that Burrow himself was made earlier this week. Football is now moving so fast that the past three no. 1 selections spent her final year of college answering all the questions scouts had about her. Baker Mayfield and Kyler Murray were not even close to consensus tops for the last few months of their college careers. It’s a tough bet for any player ready to break out in 2020: Even being absent in a non-matched college season may not be enough to shoot carriers in a traditional way.
The reality, of course, is that the pandemic has created deeply unfair circumstances for enormous swaths of players. This applies to people in almost every facet of life. This is, quite simply, a deep injustice year. Hundreds of players who in previous years would have tried out for teams as undrafted free agents could not even set foot on a pro field this offseason. Many rookies who were signed up as free agents were later cut as teams cut their rosters from 90 players to 80 to improve social distance.
In the next draft cycle, every college player on the fronts will miss the opportunity to work out for teams. In the absolute best-case scenario, they have to wait an extra year. Earlier this summer, an NFL team member this year compared the rookie class to job seekers who graduated from the Great Recession a decade ago. You will never get this opportunity back. It’s a bad time to be a young footballer trying to make ends meet.
However, you may see a little more influence on college football in the NFL than you would have thought otherwise. The past decades of pro football, schematically, has been defined by the liberal lending of college schemes. In short, the schedule world is flat. This evolution has always involved a lot of phone conversations between pro coaches and college coaches about what schedules work and how to implement them. This includes Josh McDaniels and Dan Mullen, as any number of coaches, who Oklahoma coach Lincoln calls Riley. After Chris Ault, who popularized gun violence, retired as Nevada coach, he worked as an adviser to the Chiefs when Alex Smith was their quarterback, and Andy Reid helped with schedules that would eventually lead the league. take over. The downside, as more of the college football season is scrapped, is that current coaches will be available for more than a short interview. They would be available for several weeks at a time. A handful of NFL decision-makers I spoke to this week said there would be a lot of interest in bringing in current college coaches as informal advisors. Indeed, teams can recruit themselves with the same fervor of college coaches from high school.
“I think people will really focus on doing everything that will create a competitive advantage, and that idea of marginal gains can gain insight from a college coach who is not normally available except for a quick phone call,” Dimitroff said. (As separate, “marginal gains” is a reference to Dimitroff’s study of famous cycling star Team Sky.)
Teams obviously need perspectives to stay active to get some evaluation. I was wondering what that looked like, so I named Quincy Avery, a private quarterback coach who has coached Deshaun Watson, Jalen Hurts and Dwayne Haskins. Avery told me he has a plan for the college quarterbacks he’s working with, who will not be playing seven-on-seven games this fall to get live reps. “We can execute the NFL concepts that teams want to see,” Avery told me. Among current college players, Avery has collaborated with Ohio State’s Justin Fields, Miami’s D’Eriq King, and Boston Brown’s Anthony Brown, among many others. He said he wants to work with fellow coaches who have worked in the NFL to flesh out the training program. There are limitations to this plan; Avery said perspectives could show her arm strength, but not, say, her presence from the pocket without full contact. “We will not be able to reflect a real-life situation where bodies are flying everywhere.” He equates these reps to a much more elevated version of a pro-day, “with the added element of competition,” he said.
For a generation of prospects, the key this year is to prove themselves if the system to do so is broken. It’s tempting to say it’s going to be weird, but that’s too easy. What it will be is extreme 2020.
