This page does not contain a prospect profile, and this site does not publish them. No rankings, no grades, no measurements for named players.
That is not modesty. It is the only honest position available to a site that does not employ scouts, does not watch the tape and does not have access to the medicals. A profile assembled from other people's profiles is a laundered opinion, and the internet is already full of them. What is genuinely missing is an explanation of the document itself — what a real report contains, in what order, and why the same player comes out of two buildings with two different numbers on him.
The report is a forecast wearing the clothes of a description
The single most useful thing to understand is that a scouting report is not a review of a college football player. It is a projection of a professional football player who does not exist yet, in a defined role, in a defined scheme, three years from now.
Everything in the document is subordinate to that question. Production is not the point; production is evidence about the question. Testing is not the point either. The point is the projection, and every section exists to constrain it.
The sections, in the order they usually appear
Bio and measurables. School, class year, age, official height, weight, hand size and arm length. Age belongs here rather than in the trivia because it does real work: a player who turns 24 in his draft year and a player who turns 21 have produced their tape against the same opponents from very different developmental positions.
Athletic testing. Combine and pro-day results, with the source of each number marked. Hand-timed and electronically timed figures are not interchangeable, and a report that mixes them without saying so is unreliable at exactly the point it is trying to be precise. The scouting terminology page covers what each drill does and does not predict.
Production and context. Statistical output, but always attached to the conditions that generated it — the scheme he played in, the quality of the players around him, the level of the opposition, the snap counts, and whether the role he filled resembles anything an NFL club would ask of him. A number without its context is not a fact about a player, it is a fact about a team.
Tape traits. The heart of the report, and the part that varies most by position. This is where the evaluator writes in specific, checkable observations rather than adjectives.
Medical. A separate grade from separate people. Injury history, current status, and the club doctors' own view after the combine examinations.
Character and interviews. Also separate, also assigned by people who are not the position scout. Background work, coach and staff interviews at the school, the formal combine interview and any facility visit.
Role, scheme fit and projection. What he can do in September, what he might do in year three, and which systems ask for what he has. A player with no clear role is a problem no amount of talent solves.
The grade. One number, or one round value, at the end.
The trait list changes with the position
Ask what "good" means and the answer is entirely positional. The vocabulary that describes a competent offensive tackle has almost no overlap with the vocabulary that describes a competent cornerback, which is why cross-position comparisons on public boards are so often meaningless.
Two things fall out of reading those lists side by side. The first is that a handful of traits are treated as close to unteachable — hip fluidity at cornerback, bend off the edge, arm length anywhere — and those are the ones that dominate an early-round grade. The second is that several headings are really questions about processing rather than athleticism, and processing is the trait the public has least access to, because it is invisible unless you know what the call was.
A grade is not a ranking
These are two different objects and conflating them causes most of the confusion in public draft coverage.
A grade is the position scout's verdict on one player, written on a club scale that no other club uses. It answers: what is this, and what round is it worth?
A board ranking is the club's stacked list, produced after the grades exist, in a room, with the general manager present. It answers: given everything we hold and everything we need, in what order would we take these people?
The board is where the grades get argued with. A player can carry a strong grade and sit lower on the board because the scheme does not want his shape, because the medical is a caution, because the club already has two of him, or simply because the head coach watched the tape and disagreed. Grades go into the room. Rankings come out of it.
This is also why "he was a second-round grade for us" and "we had him ranked 40th" are different statements a front office can make about the same player without contradicting itself.
Why two clubs grade the same player differently
Not because one of them is careless. The variation is structural, and it comes from at least five places.
| Source of divergence | What it does to the grade |
|---|---|
| Scheme | A defensive front that asks its ends to two-gap wants different traits from one that asks them to attack a gap. The same player is a fit and a misfit. |
| Role definition | Grading a player as a starter and grading him as a rotational specialist produce different numbers from identical tape. |
| Weighting | Every club decides for itself how much a medical caution or a character flag discounts a football grade. That weighting is a policy choice, not an observation. |
| Evaluator | Area scouts, position coaches and coordinators watch different things and are trusted differently in different buildings. |
| Tier boundaries | Where one club draws the line between its second and third tiers, another draws it one player earlier. Every apparent reach is somebody else's tier boundary. |
The dispersion is largest exactly where the stakes are highest. A quarterback splits rooms because the trait that matters most — processing under pressure against professional disguise — is the one the college tape shows least reliably, so clubs are extrapolating rather than observing, and extrapolations diverge.
The practical consequence: there is no such thing as the grade on a player. There are thirty-two of them, they are not published, and the public number that circulates instead is an average of people who do not have the medicals.
For how these documents get produced across the year, see the draft calendar. For what happens to a graded player once he is a pick with a price attached, see the trade value chart.