Editor’s note: Yahoo Sports reporter Pete Thamel spent nearly a year entrenched with NFL scouts in preparation for the 2018 draft. This is the first story of a 10-part series.

Secret life of NFL scouts

• Part 1: How the Dolphins’ draft came together

• Part 2: How GM, coaches work together in picking players

• Part 3: Examining the player and the person

• Part 4: What scouts look for at practices

• Part 5: ‘We don’t want a team of exceptions’

• Part 6: Why ‘workout wonders’ can become draft busts

• Part 7: One grunt keeps tabs on all players, schools

• Part 8: Memorable ‘Olympic marathon’ debate over Jordy Nelson

• Part 9: Why scouts love visiting Nick Saban and Alabama

• Part 10: The calm of Miami Dolphins draft night

• Breaking down the 8 players Miami drafted



WEST POINT, Texas – On a chilly October night, somewhere between Houston and Austin on Highway 71, Miami Dolphins national scout Matt Winston feels the steering wheel on his pickup truck begin to shake uncontrollably. He carefully veers the car to the breakdown lane and exits into the darkness, a blanket of stars providing the only dim glimmer of light.

A quick peek reveals a full blowout of the back right tire, leading to a futile attempt to dislodge the spare from beneath the rental four-door Nissan Titan. As Winston lays on the ground beneath the truck to scout his options, a succession of 18-wheelers speed past on their fly routes west, and Winston’s truck shakes correspondingly as each passes by.

Somewhere around 9:45 p.m., after flipping through the vehicle’s manual and attempting every possible angle to crank the spare from beneath the truck, Winston calls a tow truck. The decision offends the sensibilities of his West Texas upbringing, and leads to an idle hour of the sing-song tick-tock of the emergency flashers providing the only soundtrack between passing vehicles. The lights on the flashers intermittently pierce the blackness – disappearing and reappearing in a hypnotic rhythm.

After hanging up with the tow truck driver, who is in no apparent rush to amble over from Bastrop, Winston can only chuckle at this quintessential scouting predicament. He recalls a line made famous by a salty old Dolphins scouting executive named Ron Labadie, who’d greet any sob story from the road with a simple answer: “Scouting is a bitch.”

View photos Commissioner Roger Goodell (L) poses with Alabama’s Minkah Fitzpatrick, the Miami Dolphins’ first draft pick on Thursday. (AP) More

Welcome to the life of an NFL scout, an existence that’s as anonymous as it is misunderstood. Winston and the nine other members of the Dolphins college scouting staff are the foot soldiers in the annual personnel chess game – the NFL draft – that’s become one of the biggest spectacles in sports and fuels a billion-dollar industry.

As the draft has evolved into a three-day event with multiple prime-time television slots, it has become arguably the second most anticipated date on the American sports calendar behind the Super Bowl. It provides a collision of America’s two biggest sporting obsessions – the NFL and college football – all shrouded with a veil of the unknown and the possible. It also holds a fascinating duality – one of the most scrutinized events is also one of the least understood, as the process to an NFL draft coming together is as unknown as the scouts themselves.

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Starting in July, the Miami Dolphins granted Yahoo Sports unique access to their scouting staff for the 2017 season. In the build-up to the 2018 NFL draft, Yahoo Sports sat in on meetings, roamed the sideline with scouts during college practices, attended a college game with executives and spent all three days of the draft in the team facility. This included dinners from Los Angeles to Mobile, Alabama, and, of course, a Wednesday night in October stranded on Highway 71 deep in the heart of Texas. (The tow trucks from Bastrop don’t come quickly, Yahoo Sports learned.)

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