How Scouting College Players Has Evolved Under Shanahan

[GTripp0012]

Originally Posted by Schneed10

I'm sorry Tripp but I have to really rip you for saying it's the same front office, because that makes no sense. Is it the same scouting group, sure. But when people refer to the "front office", they are referring to the person(s) who are ultimately making the player acquisition decisions.

Scouting departments are front office support people, not decision makers. They evaluate the talent. They evaluated it for Cerrato and now the evaluate the talent for Shanahan. But that's a huge delineation.

Shanahan, his son, and Haslett are defining and communicating the type of players they are looking for, while Campbell and his team go find them. In the past, Campbell and his team would go find them, and Vinny would end up picking whoever he thought would work best for Zorn.

But Vinny and Zorn weren't communicating, and it's clear in this article that Campbell was saying he wasn't getting much in the way of direction from the decision makers at the top. So it's no wonder Vinny went with the BPA strategy when he was in charge - the communication was so poor between coach, GM, and scouts that he didn't even adequately grasp what the team needed.

Scouts are only as good as the decision makers they support. You can provide all the quality analysis in the world, but if the decision makers can't communicate well enough to put the analysis to good use, then shitty decisions get made.

I think with the way Shanahan is making better use of Campbell's abilities, it bodes well for improved drafting and team composition going forward.

The big issue is, if you have an old 'front office' who lacked basic communication skills and tried to load the team full of talent and just hoped that it all worked out in the end (and blamed others when it didn't), and you have a different front office that communicates what it needs and trains its scouts to find a certain kind of player, and still consistently makes questionable decisions (maybe not so much on the college level), where is the issue? That the team consistently makes questionable hires for its 'front office' or that it's not changing the right pieces.

I'm on board with the idea that things have gotten better in the last two months from where they bottomed out in October, but the positives in the Shanahan front office sure feel a lot like the positives from the Cerrato front office. The biggest issue remains the lack of substantive organizational year-to-year improvement.