VONTAZE BURFICT IS not in the room. He isn't one week away from his first trip to the Pro Bowl. He isn't stretched out on a white leather sectional couch at his girlfriend's parents' house. He doesn't have a Chihuahua asleep on his thigh. And there isn't a vacuum cleaner whirring down one hallway while a piano plinks down the other.

Okay, actually, he is here, and that is all happening. Physically. But mentally, the Bengals linebacker is far, far away from this home in North Texas.

He's asked to review some plays that have been loaded onto a laptop. But he politely says he doesn't need to see the film. Instead, his eyes fix on the floor beneath his feet and tap into the hard drive of his mind. Every play is in there. Every tackle over the past two years -- all 298 of them -- is ready for on-demand analysis. Like Professor X on the Cerebro.

First it flashes to Week 1 against the Bears. Bubble screen left to Brandon Marshall. Burfict flares from the middle as if someone had emailed him the playcall before hand. He lights up Marshall for a four-yard loss. "I'd visualized it prior to the game," he says. "I'd pictured it so many times, I knew it was coming."

Now his brain fires backward, to 2012. Week 7 against the Steelers. Mike Wallace catches a short pass that looks like a sure touchdown. It's not; Burfict miraculously appears, making a shoestring bring-down inside the 10. "In college I would have tried to hit him high and probably would have missed. Now I think with my hands. I tackle with my hands."

But then Burfict finds a sore spot for him, and an illuminating one for us. What he's about to describe, in painstaking detail, is a direct window into the ultimate unexplored part of evaluating NFL talent: the football brain.

Burfict squints and burrows into his mind. Paul Brown Stadium, on Dec. 22, 2013. He's standing on his own 30-yard line, up 42-7, in a blowout win against the Vikings. Minnesota has the ball at the end of the third quarter, a meaningless drive in a game that Cincinnati would win by four touchdowns.

It's not meaningless to Burfict. If he recalls all of his tackles in HD, then his memories of what's about to happen are in Imax. It's a missed tackle, one of only two he says he had all season. "Cordarrelle Patterson, right?" he asks.

In his head, he can visualize the entire sequence. Patterson takes the toss for a sweep to the wide side of the field, bolting for the corner. Burfict feels the play before he sees it. He blows through the line untouched. But as he arrives at Patterson, so does Vikings fullback Jerome Felton. The collision is massive, and as usual, Burfict flattens his target. Patterson is just a few feet away to the left. He's still in the backfield, having hesitated briefly waiting for the block, but he's about to take off.

As Burfict describes the scene, his hands come off the dog and start working on the ghost of Felton. "I was supposed to spin the fullback, but instead I boxed him. I figured Patterson wasn't going to cut it up because of all the linebackers bunched up in the middle. So I boxed him with the fullback and then immediately tried to get off the block."

Now his eyes close as his hands make a dual sweeping motion. "As soon as I got off the block, I had both my arms out. He was right there. Then in one step, he was running full speed to the sideline. I was one step behind it. One move behind it. As soon as I looked up, he was gone. He scored on a 35-yard touchdown. I got a concussion on that play. But I remember it."

Hey, you know no one drafted you in 2012 because you weren't supposed to be able to think like this, right? "Yeah, I know." There are pages of scouting reports saying you lacked the kind of discipline it took to break down film like you just did? "Yeah, I know." So if we had come to you three years ago and asked you to do this same thing then that you did just now, would you have been able to?

"Hell no."

AS SCOUTS AND executives dig into the evaluation process, it's helpful to reassess the Vontaze Burficts of the world. Because when this year's draft concludes, with 250-plus players being picked, several thousand football experts will still have either missed several future stars, or badly underrated how their skills would translate to the NFL.

Just take a look at the 2013 All-Pro team -- Burfict, Antonio Brown, Jason Peters, Greg Hardy, Robert Mathis, Richard Sherman ... none of whom was picked in the first four rounds of the NFL draft. Throw in undrafted players Wes Welker, Arian Foster and Tony Romo and the league is littered with players who slipped through the cracks but have figured out how to slip into the Pro Bowl. So how can that happen? How can months of film study, interviews and every measurement imaginable not net every future star?

The reality is, an NFL draft pick has about a coin flip's chance of sticking in the league. Often, when sifting through reams of compiled data about more than 1,000 prospects, teams drift toward the safer pick, the guy with a really fast 40 time or gaudy numbers. At least then, the scouting department can point to gaudy athletic gifts with some degree of plausible deniability.

The Seahawks are the best example of talent evaluators who are hunting longer and harder for players like Vontaze Burfict. After the 43-8 dismantling of Denver in the Super Bowl, Sherman hobbled into the media room with a high ankle sprain, plopped down his crutches and promptly delivered a blistering case against the way the NFL seeks talent. He cited every overlooked Seahawks defensive player and where they were selected -- Sherman, fifth round in 2011; Super Bowl MVP Malcolm Smith, seventh round in 2011; Kam Chancellor, fifth round in 2010. He made sure to point out that none of them had the best shuttle run or Wonderlic score. But, as he likes to say, they had "All-Pro minds" that are barely tested during the run-up to the draft. "I don't believe in the draft process," Sherman said that night.

Rumors and gossip about Burfict overtook stories about his great plays. Marc Lebryk/USA TODAY Sports

At least Burfict's plummet in the 2012 draft makes some sense. He'd started out as the Pac-10 defensive freshman of the year, lauded for his natural ball-hawking instincts. As a sophomore he was an All-American, praised for an aggressiveness that often resulted in personal fouls, but was seen by NFL evaluators as an indicator of the kind of aggression that helps one overcome a slow step or thick waist. "That's when the comparisons to Ray Lewis really started," says ESPN NFL draft expert Mel Kiper Jr. "You heard people talking about raw ability, something they could refine once he was drafted, which everyone believed would happen very early in that 2012 draft."

But by the end of his junior season, all of the early descriptions -- raw, unrefined, explosive -- had shifted from positives to negatives. As a 6-2 would-be championship season deteriorated into a 6-7 hot mess, so did Burfict's reputation. But why?

"There are two ways these guys are evaluated," an NFL scout explained during this year's bowl season, swiping through his iPad to pull up clips and stats on Burfict from that 2011 season. Scouts attend college practices and games nearly year-round. They love to talk. But they know they will be fired in an instant if their name is attached to what they have to say. "First, there is this stuff: the hard, fast data and the film. It doesn't lie. And what it told us about him that year was that the football player was still in there. Forget the personal fouls (an NCAA-leading 22 in 37 games). A good coach can work with mean. But the second part of this process is the part that you don't see."