Scouting is an imperfect science.
During the 2019 NFL Combine, I spoke with an NFL general manager, and he told me the brutal truth – no one knows what prospects will be great. It’s all a guessing game. He joked that although media-based mock drafts were laughable, not even general managers or scouts truly could predict the future.
That’s because they’re scouting college athletes competing against other college athletes while trying to project them in NFL schemes. Every year we see it when an undrafted free agent turns out to be better than a first-round pick. Teams overthink testing numbers and measurements and sometimes ignore the tape.