But as the Ravens and 31 other teams approach an unprecedented draft, their challenge of finding a signal amid the noise of testing numbers and statistical production and historical comparisons is perhaps more daunting than ever. The coronavirus pandemic kept college scouts off the road in the fall and canceled the NFL scouting combine this winter. Big-name players opted out. Some small-school programs never played.
The teams that can best bring order to the chaos, that can separate game speed from track speed, may be the ones most willing to fill in the blanks of old-school scouting with new-age technologies: GPS tracking, computer vision, proprietary metrics.