How Scouting College Players Has Evolved Under Shanahan

[The Goat]

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.

It takes a tedious massaging of logic to say solid process is there without solid results. We know it's a different process now. Nobody, period, "knows" it's a better process.

Our current status is still early in the rebuilding process. Arguably, it's no further along than the day Mike became coach. It appears we're still searching for a quality, dependable left tackle. The WR corp is still unimpressive. The defensive secondary still underperforms.

Similarities between prior to Mike v now...solid defensive front seven. Top TE talent. Low-threat passing game.

Biggest difference between then and now: a QB who can manage most games and win a couple/few over a season.

So to recap: our defense is not quite as good as before Mike but basically the same; our passing attack is still pretty harmless; our running game is marginally better; but most importantly we threw out Jason Campbell and didn't do anything whatsoever at QB for two full seasons.

If Mike and Kyle "find" their QB now we'll never know how close they were to total failure. If they don't find their QB now we'll be about 5-11 again, and the process argument should be long over.