Posts tagged College All Star Games

Futures: Senior Bowl Preview

Is UNC defensive end Quinton Coples the next Jason Pierre-Paul? Jene Bramel says the potential is there but like everything earned in life, he has to put in the work to hone his gifts.
The Senior Bowl practices begin next week on the Martin Luther King holiday. Photo by Jene Bramel.

Another year, another Senior Bowl. What I am looking for, and what does the format of the Senior Bowl help me see?

Futures: Senior Bowl Preview

by Matt Waldman

There will be hundreds of Senior Bowl Previews available within the next seven days. Most of them will explain why the game is important to the NFL and the participating player. Only a few writers won’t provide 3-4 sentence summaries of the prospects.

I have provided this type of preview in one form or another since I began attending five years ago. I’m doing some of that once again this year, but I’m also sharing a more personal preview of the event. In addition to disclosing what I want to see from dozens of players, this preview will cover what else all-star games offer me as an evaluator of talent with my own publication devoted to offensive skill prospects.

Continual Football Education

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At its core, studying tape is a solitary pursuit focused on the end product. Attending all-star game practices provides a glimpse into another dimension of the game, its coaches, and its players behind the scenes.

The opportunity to watch two NFL coaching staffs conduct a practice for a week provides insight into not only what’s important to them, but also what I can reasonably expect a player to reveal about his game during these sessions.

There are prospects that arrive in Mobile with a reputation for a certain skill set based on their junior and senior film, but the practices reveal something important about their game that the past two years of tape doesn’t show. I was fortunate enough to see Bengals receiver Marvin Jones showcase his skills as vertical threat during his sophomore year, but because his role at Cal changed after his sophomore year, many observers had their eyes opened for the first time when they witnessed Jones’ big-play ability at the Senior Bowl.

Practices vary in tone, tempo, and detail and it means the type of information one can gain varies from year to year. While I’ve expressed my utopian ideal for the Senior Bowl in the past, the practical approach is to be prepared to take what you can get.

When Buffalo’s staff ran a week of practice a few years ago, special teams had heightened priority and the teaching moments from individual drills were less frequent. There’s still a lot to see, but practices don’t serve as an informal technique clinic, which Bengals and Lions practices often were.

Former Detroit offensive coordinator Scott Linehan’s practice sessions for the offense at the Senior Bowl were especially good. He had an up-tempo style and packed the mornings with a variety of drills that tested and taught details that prospects needed to develop into more complete players.

Learning What’s Valuable (And What’s Not) From Practices

Everyone gets something different from watching practice. My book focuses on skill prospects, so I don’t spend much time . . . (read the rest at Football Outsiders)

How I Would Change The Senior Bowl

Tom Moore, Senior Bowl Coach Emeritus. Has a ring to it. Learn why the Senior Bowl should become a lyceum for coaching. Photo by Ringfrenzy
Tom Moore, Senior Bowl Coach Emeritus. Has a ring to it. Learn why the Senior Bowl should become a lyceum for coaching. Photo by Ringfrenzy

I’ll have practice observations from Day Three coming soon, but first I want to share what I would do to take the Senior Bowl into the 21st century if given the power to make major changes. The benefits would far outweigh the costs – especially in a league in its golden age making money hand over first.

Phil Savage is doing a lot to create an infrastructure that will address the minor flaws of the Senior Bowl experience. There is more organization with team interviews at the team hotels. There’s a greater level of separation among NFL team representatives, media, and fans. He has even gotten the NFL to allow fourth-year juniors with degrees to participate – a first. And as I’ve mentioned a couple of times this week, Savage wants the NFL more involved in scouting players it wants to invite to the game as well as encouraging prospects to accept the invitation.

The new director of the Senior Bowl understands that there isn’t much incentive for the highest profile seniors to attend the event. If I were an agent for Geno Smith, Tyler Eifert, or Tavon Austin, I wouldn’t recommend them to accept an invitation. It is common knowledge that 90 percent of the on-field portion of player scouting has already been done by now, why risk an injury before the NFL Combine? At present, the Combine and pro days have a greater perceived impact on a prospect’s draft stock and the prep time to “game” these pseudo-football drills is of precious value to a prospect. A player with a minor or nagging injury has more to lose exacerbating the injury or underwhelming observers at the Senior Bowl than skipping the event altogether.

I can appreciate what Savage is doing to tighten up the event even if what he is tackling is low-hanging fruit. However, he’ll have to make bigger changes if he wants to cut the 25 percent turn-down rate among first-invites to 10-12 percent. Savage and the Senior Bowl staff encouraged NFL team representatives multiple times this week to give feedback on how to make the event better.

If I were a high-ranking official of an NFL team and what I perceive as an outsider looking in is accurate, then I have a number of big changes that I would make to transform the Senior Bowl into a sterling, must-attend event that even the agents of the crème de la crème would have to encourage their clients to go. These are big-picture moves that would make scouting this game easier, enhance the image of the game and the NFL, begin to prepare the players for professional football both on and off the field, and ultimately increase the brand of the Senior Bowl to its customers and sponsors.

Hire Full-Time Coaching Staffs

I recognize the appeal of NFL staffs coaching the Senior Bowl rosters. The perception is that these teams offer players a wealth of football experience, cutting-edge teaching techniques, and it’s all backed by prestige of the NFL shield. This is my fourth year here and I don’t buy it.

The differences in quality and methodology among coaching staffs across the league are vast. Northern Illinois running back Chad Spann spent time with the Colts, Buccaneers, and Steelers during the 2011 season. The structure, the attention to teaching, and the culture of the teams all differed. It’s the same when watching the Lions run a practice compared to the Raiders, Bills, Dolphins, Bengals, or Vikings. The basic intent of some drills may be similar, but the methods, the pace, and the feedback are often worlds apart. Although there where good things I learned from the Raiders wide receiver drills, I would have felt cheated as a Senior Bowl receiver if I saw what the Lions staff did with its players.

One of the major changes I’d make is to ask the NFL to create a budget for a coaching staff with two head coaches and a full complement of assistants. The staff would assist Savage in scouting and selecting players for the event. Since there is only one game for the Senior Bowl coaches every year, the Senior Bowl committee could create programs where these coaches could hold seminars or panels for college and pro coaches to exchange ideas during the offseason. The Senior Bowl could become an incubator for coaching innovation – as my friend Sigmund Bloom would call a “Lyceum for football coaches.”

This job could have a lot of appeal for some of the great coaches of the game who may no longer wish to travel or have the same killer schedule as an NFL team, but still have something great to offer to the game as a professor emeritus of coaching. They could do consulting for NFL teams. Imagine Howard Mudd, Tom Moore, or Tony Dungy as assistant or head coaches-in-residence. The league could even have an NFL scouting school and these graduates or teachers are part of the ground-floor process of narrowing down players to invite for the game. There are a ton of far-reaching innovations from this idea that could prove lucrative for the Senior Bowl and provide long-term benefit to the NFL.

The best value of a change like this one for teams, scouts, and media is that I would require these coaches to agree upon the same drills to run prospects through their paces during Senior Bowl Week. The order, location, and execution of the drills would all be uniform. This would be easier for teams to know where to station its scouts, help the planning committee organize the viewing experience, and most important, make it easier to see how players performed relative to each other.

Add 3-5 Days to the Event

If the Senior Bowl were 10-14 days in length, the event could then become the place where the NFL has its rookie symposium. Although many of these rookies won’t make the NFL, several of them will play professional football of some sort in the CFL or Arena League. Helping these prospects become aware of the pitfalls a professional football life on and off the field can never start too early – especially during a time where players are shopping for agents, financial advisors, and are targeted to accept loans before they even see contracts. Make the Senior Bowl seminars a voice of proactive sanity.

Another benefit of extending the event is that the Senior Bowl should increase its invitation list and add another 22-44 prospects as “taxi squad” invites. They’ll attend the symposiums, study the playbooks, and have the opportunity to meet with teams, but they won’t practice unless a player from an active roster gets hurt or drops out. The additional roster spots give the bubble players a better chance to be prepared than flown down the day of practice and fitted into pads on the field while a coach is giving them a crash course of the practice schedule or scheme. This would reduce the number of players turning down the event and it would also alter the perception that the Senior Bowl is always scrambling at the last minute to fill its rosters.

Make the Mobile the “Official NFL Convention”

If the Senior Bowl could hire full-time coaches, create a coaching institute and farm out consulting, institute a scouting school, and host the Rookie Symposium, the Senior Bowl would no longer be the “Unofficial NFL Convention.” Mobile would become a hub where old and new exchange ideas, players make career transitions to scouts and coaches, and college prospects get top-notch coaching and exposure to wisdom on and off the field to prepare them for the profession. This type of investment would be good for the NFL on so many levels, I can’t see a downside. Can you?

What to Expect from the Senior Bowl

Quinton Coples anchors a South squad defensive front that should have a good day in the Senior Bowl game. Photo by Jene Bramel.

College all-star game practices are different every year because there’s always a new coaching staff running them. This year, both the Redskins and Vikings coaches did less with its running backs and quarterbacks than what I saw in team practices run by the Lions, Bengals, Bills, and Dolphins in recent years. The same can be said about defensive players in general, because they are not allowed to finish plays.

The game will provide a little more insight into these players where practice couldn’t. Although film study of players during their college careers is still far and away more important than what this game will reveal, I thought it worthwhile to share what I believe you’ll see in the actual North-South match up. Here’s what I saw in Mobile this week that I believe will translate to the game: Continue reading

Sigmund Bloom Part II

The case of Chiefs RB/KR/WR Dexter McCluster may not seem as obvious, but he represents the ongoing trend with NFL strategy and personnel that draws parallels to smart phones in our society. Photo by Tennessee Journalist Wade Rackley.

In this part of my conversation with Sigmund Bloom, Footballguys senior staff writer and Draftguys co-founder, we discuss NFL trends, the appeal of the NFL Draft, and the value of the Game Recaps he does at Footballguys.com.

Waldman: Tell me about the more profound things you’ve learned about the game on the field because of your work as a fantasy football writer/analyst?

Bloom: I think that one of the things that is really fun to watch and has a massive impact on fantasy football is the natural intelligence of the game that evolves during a game. This happens when you have smart quarterbacks and smart coordinators. It’s the classic idea that if something is working then why go away from it? The game tells you which way to go. The game will guide smart coaches and quarterbacks to exploit something and continue to exploit it until the other team adjusts. Finding players who are smart enough and talented enough to do it is a big part of it. Seeing how in the course of the game that the first drive can tell you whether it’s going to be a big day for a player and it could be a player who hasn’t done much coming into the game, but because what the team knew about its opposition heading into the week it was going to be a big day. We try to perfect our ability to anticipate that on a weekly basis. Again that is where a lot of success in fantasy football comes from in-season.

Waldman: So tell me about some of the players or coaches that you see that are good at spotting a weakness and exploiting it until they are stopped.

Bloom: Of course Continue reading