Of course, the most important thing you can do is watch college football... and lots of it! Sometimes it takes a trained eye to analyze all the nuances of a player's game, but by simply watching for the players that stand out during a game, you'll be able to build on the list you have already formed. And as you grow more experienced, spotting players with potential becomes easier, although it is never an exact science.
Getting Ready for Game Day
Most of you won't have the luxury of being able to fly all over the country to watch the players in person, so in most cases you'll have to rely on the television, VCR, and tons of video tape.
It's not unusual for me to have three or four VCR's taping at one time on a Saturday afternoon, especially if I am away at a game. There is no way to accurately assess a player when you are flipping from game to game, and if you miss a play, it's gone. So I video tape as many games as I possibly can, even if I am watching it live, so I can go back and focus on one player at a time. I can rewind plays and watch them over and over as I analyze a player's technique. And I can use the same game tape to analyze as many as a dozen players, or more, in a single game.
Make sure you don't wait until Saturday morning to decide your game plan for the weekend. Check your local listings ahead of time for the games that are televised in your area and decide which ones would be best to watch from a scouting standpoint.
At the beginning of the season, you will probably want to choose the games with the most potential draft prospects just to be sure you get a look at as many players as possible. This is where the sorting function of your database comes in handy. You can sort players by team to get a feel for which games will provide the best opportunity as far as the number of players.
As the season wears on, you may want to look for games with players you have yet to analyze. Using the sort function again, which usually allows you to sort by more than one criteria, you can choose to sort by comments first (assuming you have entered comments for every player you have already scouted) and school second.
What this will do is change the listing around so that all records that have no comments in the comments field will be sorted together, and within that group of records the players will be grouped by team. This will give you a good indication as to which teams you need to take a look at as the season winds down.
Once you have decided which games you want to record, get your machines ready to go and get as much on video tape as you think you can handle watching over the next five or six days.
In lesson two, it's time to sit down and watch some football. We'll discuss how to go about evaluating players in general before we get down to the specifics of what to look for at each position.