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More detail on Belichick's stacking and scouting:

By Tom E. Curran
NBCSports.com
updated 5:46 p.m. ET, Tues., Feb. 26, 2008


Image: Tom Curran
Tom E. Curran
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INDIANAPOLIS - “Be prepared.” It’s the Boy Scout motto all the time. It’s the NFL scouts’ motto right now.

When the head of the football-watching world swivels in the direction of incoming NFL talent, the work done by the league’s 32 scouting departments comes into view. And while fans might be just starting to place faces next to names like Joe Flacco, Leodis McKelvin and Jeff Otah, scouts know what kind of toothpaste these kids use.

And while the immediate focus is on the 2008 draft class, scouts are already conversant in the 2009 group.

But after all the preparation is done and all the information is evaluated, which NFL scouting departments do the best job year after year in stocking their roster?

Talking to scouts, coaches and general managers at the NFL Scouting Combine, the same franchises came up over and over.

The Indianapolis Colts, New England Patriots, San Diego Chargers, Baltimore Ravens, New York Giants, Pittsburgh Steelers and Green Bay Packers.

“Look at the people who have good records,” said Colts president Bill Polian, probably the most consistently successful GM of the past two decades. “One flows from the other.”

How does a decision-maker like Polian know if his scouting department is doing its job?

“It isn’t just who you draft, it’s what your reports say,” he explained. “That, and how your board’s constructed. Sometimes who you draft is a function of luck. How that player performs is a function of luck. Injuries or off-field issues (can arise). What I want to make sure of every year — and what our scouting people are charged with doing — is determining whether or not we’re getting the right information and putting the right grade on a player. It’s the input on the baseline level that’s critically important.”

After months of scouting, players are given an overall grade. Those generally run from 1.0 (extreme longshot to make any team) to 9.0 (possible franchise player). Most first-rounders come in between 6.0 and 7.0.

Teams won’t stack every draft-eligible player. Once a team gets to the point where its ranking players that couldn’t make their team at that position, they stop grading.

Then comes the vertical stack at a given position.

As Patriots coach Bill Belichick explained in a Providence Journal piece on draft preparation a few years back, “As you vertically stack, it's just, 'The first is better than the second, the second's better than the third.'"

After the vertical stack comes the more difficult horizontal stack in which players with the same grades are stacked. That’s when scouting, personnel and coaches decide whether a linebacker with a 6.0 grade is better than a tight end with a 6.0.

"This part is hard," Belichick said. "Here you start talking about a corner on the rise versus a center who's a good player, but not a good athlete. At some point you have to break up that clump and say, 'OK, this is one, this is two, this is three.' Even if you have 15 guys in the 6.0 range and another 15 in the 6.1, you have to determine, 'This guy over that guy, that guy over the next guy,' and now you're in another vertical stack within your horizontal stack.

Then comes the final vertical stack, which should now be easier to complete thanks to the first two steps. Still, Belichick explained, “You get situations where you see a guy at 65 and you know you'd take him before the guy you have at 51. So who's in the wrong place? The guy at 51 or the guy at 65?"

And that’s where the scouting staff’s work comes in.

Here’s how Belichick breaks down the Patriots’ process.

“First we scout regionally, then we have our scouts who scout nationally come in and look at those players. [The national scouts] will see all the players on offense, defense, east of the Mississippi, west of the Mississippi. Then, by the end of November we break it up and do it positionally. By the time the combine comes [in March], a regional scout, the national scout, a position scout, a position coach and, ultimately, (Vice President of Player Personnel) Scott Pioli and I will look at them. We get six or seven looks at a guy. When we put the whole board together, that's where Scott and I and the national scouts come in and start stacking horizontally."

And even after all that work, there is room for the ultimate decision-maker to exert his authority.

“Sometimes Bill (Polian) gets a feeling,” Colts coach Tony Dungy said. “He had it about Bob Sanders (drafted 44th in 2004). He had it about Dallas Clark. Pretty soon, when Bill gets a feeling I start to get a feeling too.”

Experience and continuity from scouting to personnel to coaching is indispensable.

“The younger the player, the more question marks. Same with scouting departments,” said Floyd Reese ESPN analyst and former Tennessee Titans GM Floyd Reese.

“Anytime you look at a department that is mature and has scouted for a while and can draw from experiences in the past (there’s an advantage). Then you top that off with a GM or decision maker who’s an experienced guy then you’ve got it together. Look right here in Indy, that’s an example. Bill Polian is experienced, Dom Anile experienced, scouts are experienced. Then you look at what they do that bears it out.

"I’ve known Bill Belichick for a long time. He and I started off lining fields together and now he’s a Hall of Fame head coach. There’s not much he’s missed. When it comes to experience and being able to draw from the past and having a person who thinks the same way with Scott (Pioli), that’s hard to beat.”

And that’s what makes those teams hard to beat from September into February.