As Reggie Ragland packs up his belongings in Tuscaloosa, Alabama, this week and makes the almost 1,000-mile journey to his new home in Buffalo, the Bills' second-round pick can expect a phone call from a former NFL linebacker he has long admired: Bart Scott.

Scott played his entire career for Bills coach Rex Ryan, first with the Baltimore Ravens from 2002 through 2008, and later with the New York Jets from 2009 through 2012. Shortly after the Bills drafted Ragland with the 41st overall selection on Friday, Ryan was already comparing one of his best former players to one of his newest students.

"[Physical], that’s what we said we’re going to bring here and that’s we’re used to that’s what we want," Ryan said. "I’ve been around the Bart Scotts of the world and things like that. This young man, his name is Reggie Ragland, it doesn’t mean Bart Scott, but there’s a lot of similarities in his play. This guy will run and hit and his cover skills are I think a lot better than he’s given credit for."

Scott agreed with the comparison, but more than that he wants to mentor the second-round pick on what it takes to play linebacker in Ryan's system. He wants to be a translator.

It has been more than three years since Scott last played in an NFL game -- a 28-9 loss by Ryan's Jets in Buffalo on Dec. 30, 2012 -- but the longtime NFL linebacker's sharp knowledge of Ryan's defenses hasn't faded.

Reggie Ragland's experience at Alabama should prepare him well for Rex Ryan's defense, which has been criticized by some players as too complex. AP Photo/Charles Rex Arbogast

Scott, now an analyst for CBS' "The NFL Today" and a consultant for Morgan Stanley's Global Sports and Entertainment division, rattled off verbiage from Ryan's playbook over the phone Tuesday morning before he headed to the gym, and later, to Florham Park, New Jersey, on Wednesday to tutor Jets players on financial literacy.

"It’s easy," Scott told ESPN.com. "It’s simple for me to learn it. It’s just understanding and learning how to speak [Ragland's] language. You learn how he thinks, how he learns and you put it in his terms, to make him understand. I can look at his Alabama defense and I can tell him what defense this really is, or obviously, 'You used to play this,' or ‘You used to play this fire zone.’ Or, ‘This fire zone is the same as here; you just said it a different way.’ That’s all it is. It’s the verbiage you have to understand, but the concepts are still exactly the same. It’s probably what he did in Alabama."

Ryan's system, Scott explained, isn't as complex as some Bills players saw it last season. Some players' gripes about the scheme could be construed as excuses for not being successful, he said. The playbook might include 30 versions of zone blitzes, as an example, but they're all zone blitzes.

"You can look at them and you can count each of them one by one, then it’s going to overwhelm you," he said. "But what he’s gonna have to do is to take the defenses and marry them with each other. Right? A zone blitz is a zone blitz. That’s one defense."

On Saturday, Ryan called Alabama's defense "the college version of our defense." The reason why, according to Scott, is that Ryan once gave coach Nick Saban a copy of his playbook -- which later stirred a minor controversy when former Jets assistant Mike Pettine believed it ended up in the hands of rival Patriots coach Bill Belichick, a friend of Saban.

Regardless of whether Ryan's playbook has landed in enemy territory, it shouldn't be as cryptic to Ragland as the Dead Sea Scrolls. In fact, Scott believes Ragland's experience in Alabama should give him a leg up on most other rookies.

"He’s more prepared for Rex’s defense than pretty much any other defensive player in the league, in football," Scott said. "It won’t take long for him to learn. It’s something that needs, and I’ve done this with anybody, I mentor a lot of people. If he needs to learn how to simplify it and put it into his own words, I’m available to talk to him, to tell him how I simplified and how I made it five defenses instead of the 150, 200 that are in the book."

Call him the linebacker whisperer. Scott sees his job as putting in layman's terms Ryan's system for young players trying to learn it. He's already worked with former UCLA linebacker Myles Jack, a second-round pick of the Jaguars, and Scott also helped prepare potential draft picks for pre-draft interviews with Kansas City Chiefs defensive coordinator Bob Sutton, a former assistant coach for Ryan in New York.

"You never want to learn specific defenses," Scott explained. "You just want to learn the concepts. Because once you learn the concepts, it doesn’t matter what he calls, you put it in the proper group and it simplifies it for you. And all you have recognize is, 'Which guy am I [with]?' And all you have to do to figure that out is to count how many people to your left or to your right."

Scott was a nine-year starter for the Ravens and Jets at weakside linebacker. Ryan has already pegged Ragland as a "Day 1" starter in that exact role for the Bills.

The SEC Defensive Player of the Year last season, the Bills were ready to select Ragland with the No. 19 pick. It wouldn't have been a stretch, either; some mock drafts had Ragland coming off the board in the first round. Yet another one of the draft's top defensive players, Clemson defensive end Shaq Lawson, slipped down the board to the Bills and they couldn't pass him up with their first pick.

As the first night of the draft ended, Ragland was still available, and the Bills wanted him. General manager Doug Whaley began calling teams with selections early in the second round. He eventually found a trade partner in the Chicago Bears, who dealt the No. 41 pick to Buffalo for the No. 49 selection, the Bills' original fourth-round pick (No. 117) and a 2017 fourth-rounder.

Why did Ragland slip so far down the board? He weighed 259 pounds at the Senior Bowl in January before dropping down to 247 pounds at February's scouting combine. His 4.72-second 40-yard dash at the combine was slower than Lawson's time, 4.70 seconds. Ragland was pegged as a lumbering, two-down linebacker better suited for the NFL of 15 or 20 years ago, not today's pass-heavy game.

"To me, that’s not true," Scott said. "He’s being labeled. Maybe they label him because he ran a 4.7. As he matures and he learns, I think he’ll probably take some of that weight off. I mean, that’s not hard to do. College is a different game depending on what you’re asked to do. You can look to Ray Lewis and how Ray Lewis played at the Super Bowl, the first Super Bowl [in 2000], at 260 [pounds]. He played in the second Super Bowl [in 2012] at 240. That’s as the game adjusts; it’s just like evolution. How animals change and evolve to what’s going on at the time, so do football players."

Bart Scott played 11 years in the NFL, all on teams in which Rex Ryan coached, and has a way to simplify Ryan's schemes to make them easier to master for individual players. Debby Wong/US Presswire

Even if Ragland doesn't deliver the same impact on passing downs as some of the draft's other top linebackers, such as the Jets' Darron Lee, he could still make his presence known with his physicality.

"I see an aggressive player, a downhill player, a player that has made some plays in the passing game," Scott said. "When you watch him, you watch him strike ball carriers, you always see them going backwards. That’s what I think the similarities between him and myself [are]. And that’s what Rex sees, is that aggressive nature. Never turning down a hit, never turning down a physical altercation. Rex can find a way to really use aggressive players, guys who are willing to sacrifice their bodies.

"A lot of times, a lot of emphasis is put on interceptions, sacks, fumbles. That’s great, too. But I always felt that nothing felt a message like a big hit. Because that’s sending a message to everybody on the field. Also the tone-setter for everybody else, because it inspires your defense and your offense."

And that's precisely what the Bills want in their defense.

"[Ragland] epitomizes what we’re trying to build here in Buffalo, and that’s a tough, physical team," Whaley told SiriusXM NFL Radio on Monday. "No matter what happens, at the end of the day, when people come in to play us, they’re going to tighten that chinstrap up a little tighter and they’re gonna know they were in a fight when they leave."