NFL team decision-makers and 319 college prospects will be arriving in Indianapolis this week for the annual Scouting Combine.
The Scouting Combine has become an oddly big, televised event on the NFL’s offseason schedule. For younger fans that’s all they’ve known of the event. It wasn’t always like that. It used to be a very secret thing. There were no cameras and no news. It was as if draft prospects and team decision-makers disappeared into a black hole for a few days. That was a very different time. This is a brief look into the history of the Scouting Combine.
Thanks to then Philadelphia Eagles owner Bert Bell, the NFL Draft was introduced in 1936. At the time, all of the best college prospects gravitated to the league’s best teams. The Chicago Bears, Green Bay Packers, and New York Giants annually re-stocked and played for championships. The rest of the league’s teams collected the remaining players and hoped for the best. There had to be a better way of spreading the available football talent more evenly and more fairly across the league. Bell suggested the draft. George Halas, Curly Lambeau, and Tim Mara reluctantly agreed. For the first few decades, scouting for the draft was an afterthought. Today’s average fantasy football participant takes part in their drafts far more prepared than those NFL team decision-makers did for their real drafts. Coaches and owners would show up to the draft and just randomly pluck names out of a college football magazine. Maybe a few of them had hot tips from friends in the college coaching ranks. There were no scouts. The first true scouts didn’t appear until the late 1940s and 1950s. Ed Kotal is generally regarded as the first person in league history to travel, watch, and evaluate college football talent. He helped build the Los Angeles Rams into an annual contender and league champion in 1951. Dick Gallagher and Sarge MacKenzie helped stock the powerful Cleveland Browns. A little later, Jack Vainisi built the Green Bay Packers team that Vince Lombardi took to ridiculous heights in the 1960s.
It’s difficult to imagine a time when football scouting was an afterthought. One of the hardships of football scouting, especially thorough scouting, is the size of this country and the number of colleges, at all levels, that pepper it. To cover it all seems impossible. With hundreds of colleges to visit and thousands of players to see and limited resources to cover them, NFL teams started to enter into partnerships to share the costs and labor. Imagine that. NFL teams working together, sharing resources and information in an effort to get better. It’s inconceivable. The first of these partnerships began in 1963. The Lions, Eagles, Steelers Talent Organization, or LESTO. The Bears joined in 1964 and LESTO magically became BLESTO. In 1964, the Baltimore Colts, Cleveland Browns, Green Bay Packers, and St. Louis Cardinals formed Central Eastern Personnel Organization (CEPO). The name was changed to United Scouting after the Atlanta Falcons, New York Giants, and Washington Redskins joined. In 1983, the name was changed to National Football Scouting. It’s now known simply as the National. In 1964, the Dallas Cowboys, Los Angeles Rams, and San Francisco 49ers formed Troika. The group became Quadra when the expansion New Orleans Saints joined in 1967. The Minnesota Vikings joined BLESTO in 1966 and BLESTO became BLESTO-V. Clever. Jerry Reichow insisted the team join as a condition of his becoming the team’s director of scouting. The Vikings are still with BLESTO and Jack Murphy is the team’s BLESTO scout. All of the NFL teams were part of some scouting partnership during the 1960s.
Prior to the 1970s, NFL teams didn’t typically give physical exams to draft prospects. Medically, the teams had little to no knowledge of the players that they were selecting. During the 1970s, that started to change as teams scheduled individual visits with draft prospects to check them out physically and medically. In both time and money, it was a very costly process. As with most NFL business from 1960-89, Dallas Cowboys general manager Tex Schramm was in the middle of change. He proposed to the league’s Competition Committee holding a centralized event at which evaluations of the draft prospects could take place. In 1982, National Football Scouting, which had expanded to 16 teams after the merger of the NFL and AFL in 1970, held the first National Invitational Camp (NIC) in Tampa. This camp formed the foundation of all those that followed. BLESTO and Quadra held their own camps.
From 1982-84, BLESTO, NFS, and Quadra held separate camps. To share costs, they decided to merge in 1985. They decided to COMBINE. This merging of the three scouting organizations is why the Scouting Combine is called the Scouting Combine. The first Scouting Combine was held in Phoenix. The second was held in New Orleans. In 1987, the event was moved to it’s, so far, permanent home, Indianapolis. This is the home city of NFS so it’s nice and convenient for them.
The Scouting Combine did not allow media coverage for nearly two decades. It was a very secret event. It was secret to the extent of being somewhat suspicious. If not suspicious, it was definitely mysterious. Everything changed in 2003 when the NFL launched their own television channel, NFL Network. The 2004 Scouting Combine was the first to be revealed to the public. With each year, the television production and coverage has gotten bigger. Now, it’s a prime time event. The evolution from a very secret event to a very public event has been astonishing. It’s gotten to the point where the actual work being done in Indianapolis feels secondary to the coverage of it.
The future of the Scouting Combine has recently been questioned. Initially, those questions arose because of players (mostly quarterbacks) opting not to take part in some of the testing (mostly throwing). More recently, a few head coaches have decided that it’s not worth their time and skip the event. I don’t really get that decision. If I was a college football prospect meeting with a team and my potential head coach isn’t even there, I’d have second thoughts about that team. My time isn’t worth his time? That’s pretty pathetic. The future of the Scouting Combine in some form should be secure. Perhaps some of the testing is a little too extra but the teams desperately need much of the information that’s gathered there. Less important but surely significant, the Scouting Combine has come to be the starting point of the NFL’s offseason. The couple of months prior to the NFL Draft wouldn’t feel the same without the strange event in Indianapolis that kicks it all off. I’d certainly miss it.
