An inside look at how college football programs treat NFL scouts

Tom Pelissero | USA TODAY Sports

For NFL scouts, there is no better campus to visit than Alabama.

Tape is available starting at 8 a.m. every day. Practices are open from fall camp through the regular season. The entry on the NFL’s secure website says it all: “No restrictions.”

“We feed them lunch and everything,” Alabama coach Nick Saban told USA TODAY Sports recently. “We treat ‘em good.”

It’s an extension of what Saban sells in recruiting: This is a place you can not only get an education and win championships, but get help extending your career individually, too.

It stands to reason others would follow the lead of one of college football’s most successful coaches. But as fall scouting season wraps up, complaints persist about restrictions that have turned scheduling into a puzzle, practices closing without notice and resources wasted on visits that yield little more than a strength coach reciting players’ bios.

Every coach gets to make his own rules on who’s available to scouts, where, when and how often. And in dozens of conversations, most on condition of anonymity because of fear of retribution from schools, NFL evaluators made clear heavier restrictions can make a difference.

“It’s a lot stricter and a lot more difficult than it used to be,” one general manager said. “Some schools just totally shut you out.”

Said another GM: “It doesn’t hurt the top players. What it hurts is the middle-of-the-road players and the down-the line-players. They don’t get seen and they might not go to an all-star game or a combine.”

The primary gripes from scouts are about how often certain schools are open, what “open” means and whether they even feel welcome on campus.

For instance, Michigan State is open two days a week. All scouts must watch tape together in one room. They’re herded into a corner before the start of practice, allowed to watch stretching and one individual period, then ordered to leave over the loudspeaker.

Down the road at Michigan, new coach Jim Harbaugh closed fall camp, then announced the first three weeks of the season would be open, only to shut down during the second week.

The dichotomy is evident in Alabama, where Saban is regarded as the most open in the country and Auburn coach Gus Malzahn among the most restrictive, though Malzahn says he has eased restrictions, opening this year for spring and fall camp and before nonconference games.

“I think we’ve got 14 players off last year’s team in the NFL right now, and that’s more than any team in college football,” Malzahn said. “That speaks for itself.”

Scouts travel because they want to check out players’ bodies, see how they work in practice and talk to anyone they can – pro liaison, position coach, strength coach, academics, trainers – to shape the whole picture, since they have little contact with players until January.

“We’re not trying to expose anything,” one veteran scout said. “We’re just trying to get to the nuts and bolts and figure out, what are you getting? What are you investing in?”

But some coaches harbor concerns about information leaking to the media or agents, underclassmen being influenced about entering the draft or time taken away from game-planning, particularly with some NFL teams sending several scouts to ask the same questions.

“It’s probably all of the above for a lot of programs,” Malzahn said. “Confidentiality sometimes (before) big games is very important.”

College football is, in essence, a free minor league for the NFL. As scouts are often told, they’re guests on campus, and they need to act accordingly. Plus, it’s a relationship business. The more people you know, or the higher your rank, the less the restrictions may apply to you.

“Most of the schools do a good job of setting their restrictions, communicating why, and they’re fairly reasonable,” said Jeff Foster, president of National Football Scouting, one of two scouting services that collects basic data on seniors in the spring for 28 teams. “But sometimes we will get schools that will surprise us and they’ll have restrictions across the board for the entire fall. That does make it hard.

“And generally, those are the schools that down the line somewhere complain to us: ‘He didn’t get invited to the combine’ and ‘you’ve got his speed estimated at this’ or ‘this information is incorrect. Well, if we don’t have access to go in and get that information, then we have to make our own assumptions based off of what we see on film.”

Every NFL team has players with issues on or off the field. It’s when teams don’t know about the issues, or feel they’re being misled, that they’re more likely to get scared off.

“If we don’t trust the information we’re getting from the school, we won’t draft a guy from that school,” the second GM said. “There’s too many players elsewhere to figure it out.”

Said a personnel director: “You’re supposed to walk into the draft meetings and have all the answers when, (expletive), you don’t know who to believe.”

There is an NFL subcommittee on college relations, but it primarily deals with rules and health and safety. Scouting restrictions haven’t come up recently, said the subcommittee’s chairman, Carolina Panthers president Danny Morrison.

Old-school scouts remember the late Joe Paterno opening practice just a week or two (and closing if the team lost). But Penn State was an outlier then. More recently, Greg Schiano was notorious at Rutgers for treating scouts poorly. There have been flaps over allowing scouts in press boxes and submitting tape to the NFL’s database, too.

Even Saban once threatened to ban scouts over frustration about agents giving players improper benefits. He also has raised concern over when underclassmen get their draft grades. But Saban says he stays open in part because he advises underclassmen to stay in school unless they’ll be first-round picks and he gets that advice by calling NFL teams.

“They know. They’ve scouted them,” Saban said. “Rather than going the other way – saying ‘I’m going to try to hide them all so you can’t see them’ – I would rather be able to give the guy good information.”

Some coaches say they like having scouts around because it makes players practice harder. The threat of scouts hearing negative information also could be a tool to keep players in line.

But not everyone buys into the benefits, leading to more restrictive policies.

“It doesn’t hurt us,” said another scout, "it hurts the kid."

Follow Tom Pelissero on Twitter @TomPelissero.