There were a lot of things that Pat Stewart expected to be a little behind the NFL when he first arrived at Nebraska, about two weeks ago, after leaving a job as an NFL pro scouting director to become the storied midwestern program’s first general manager. But there was one particular thing that really wasn’t, truth be told, that caught him by surprise.
The players.
Stewart, as you’d expect, was thinking he’d dive into high school tape and have to adjust his eyes to something that might not even look like the same sport he was evaluating over his 17 years working in NFL personnel departments. Instead, as he dove into one high-end, defensive front-seven prospect out of Texas, and then another, he was actually … impressed.
“They’re using their hands at the point of attack. And it was like, ,” Stewart says. “That kind of blew me away, because I thought it was going to be a bunch of bad high school football, right? But you can tell there’s a lot of really good players that are coming up, entering college, who are already trained at a high level, have high-quality coaching. That, to me, has been the most fun thing about this so far.
“There’s probably a little bit of, . But these are all really good players. Like, at the end of the day, football is football.”
These are different times in America’s game, and the presence of folks like Stewart in major college football is vivid evidence of that. High school players are more prepared than ever before. College players are getting paid. The NFL, as a result, is impacted—sometimes for the better and sometimes the worse—at a lot of different levels.
And this time of year, draft season, is when we’re seeing it most. NFL scouting departments are being poached for evaluators like Stewart, as the college game adapts to a landscape that’s being irreversibly changed. That landscape is now producing a very different field of prospects than the NFL’s been used to scouting.
These changes didn’t happen overnight.
But they sure have kicked into overdrive over the past half-decade, which makes this as good a time as any to examine where it’s being felt at the sport’s highest level.
