The question long regarded as a go-to of NFL general managers and coaches hoping to get a feel for the maturity and mental makeup of draft prospects has now become obsolete.
“What are you going to get with your first signing bonus?” talent evaluators would often ask early in their first face-to-face interviews with prospects at the NFL’s annual scouting combine.
Traditionally, those prospects had toiled in the amateur ranks for three to four years, honing their skills with visions of professional contracts and life-changing riches dangling before them. The combine drills and interviews helped affirm the assessments compiled by NFL scouts and reflect the hunger of the athletes craving the jump to the pros.
But everything changed five years ago with the Supreme Court decision that made it almost impossible for the NCAA to regulate how an athlete was compensated for their name, image and likeness. Gone are the days of the penniless college athletes, so too is the level of desperation prospects felt to make the jump to the pros as quickly as possible. Multiple general managers estimated that around 25 potential top-100 draft picks elected to stay in school rather than apply for early entry into the draft, leaving the NFL and its teams with a shrunken talent pool.
Many of the prospects that have opted for the draft find themselves already in a place of financial security. Some have earned millions during their college careers (dwarfing the salaries of NFL players earning the veterans minimum). Others have pulled in a few hundred grand. As a result, transformational finances no longer rank among the chief motivating factors for draft prospects.
And so, NFL talent evaluators have had to adapt while still trying to accomplish the goal of evaluating the hunger and drive of prospects and pinpointing the ideal pieces to add to their franchises.
“We’re always trying to evaluate (hunger),” New York Giants general manager Joe Schoen explained at the combine. “Because it used to be, ‘What’s this kid going to be like with money? What’s he going to do now?’ These guys all come to the league and they have money, so now it’s, ‘How much do they love football? Would they do it for free?’ So we’re always trying to analyze it. Do they transfer four times because they’re chasing the bag? That’s really what our scouts do. They do a phenomenal job of getting background at the schools or the relationships with coaches. That’s where it’s integral.”
Viewpoints of today’s prospects and their approach to the pre-draft process vary greatly depending on who you talk to. Whether it’s former NFL players still closely associated with the game as coaches, team or league employees, or other NFL coaches, scouts and higher-level talent evaluators, everyone sees this new generation a little differently.
Athlete and agent opinions on the importance of the combine have shifted over time. Just as players have begun opting out of bowl games to avoid unnecessary risk of serious injury, top prospects have become more selective of which aspects of the NFL’s biggest job fair they wish to take part in. Some pick and choose which on-field portions they want to use to showcase their skills. Others skip all drills and simply take part in interviews and medical evaluations.
Some old heads frown upon athletes who pass up another opportunity to compete on the field and make a strong impression on potential employers. They view a reluctance or refusal to take part in drills as a sign of entitlement. But because they can’t just write off every athlete that opts out of a bowl or all-star game or combine drill (doing so obviously would be unwise given the number of high-level prospects that have begun making such calls), many NFL talent evaluators elect to frame things differently.
They acknowledge that they’re now dealing with young men who view themselves as businessmen, and so, they opt to extend them a greater degree of understanding.
“I think you can look at that in two different ways,” New England Patriots executive vice president of player personnel Eliot Wolf said. “Maybe they’re coming in a little bit more entitled, but on the other hand, they’re coming in more prepared, from a business standpoint, like they’ve had money. They know what it’s like. They know some financial literacy and understanding the trials and tribulations that come with that. So I think it’s a double-edged sword. It’s like anything. You just have to be able to adjust. And every person can be different.”
The best of NFL GMs, scouts and coaches have always approached the draft prospect evaluation process with a belief that each element — game tape, combine, pro day performances, medicals, interviews — is a piece of the puzzle. Rather than let one decision (or non-decision) sway their opinion, they probe deeper and place a higher premium on the research of scouts and information gleaned through interviews and pre-draft visits. Some teams view the fact that prospects are now coming into the NFL with dramatically improved financial situations as a positive and another evaluation tool.
“I think it’s made it easier because you don’t have to wonder how they’ll carry themselves once they get money,” Las Vegas Raiders general manager John Spytek said. “You know the ones that love the game and do the right things. They may have money in college, but they still carry themselves the right way, they still play the right way. They love the game, they’re there for their teammates, and I think it’s kind of the character illuminator.”
Some general managers even view prospects who haven’t handled money swimmingly as a blessing in disguise, theorizing that those early lessons will position the players for more sound decision-making early in their NFL careers.
“I like to follow the whole journey,” Chicago Bears GM Ryan Poles said. “I don’t hold it against an 18-year-old that gets a million bucks to go to school and maybe didn’t have his priorities straight. Most of us here, if that happened to us, we’d want to do some crazy things, too, or maybe not focus where we should be focused.
“But I want to see the learning lessons that come from that. I want to understand their structure of the people they put around them. I want to understand how they battle through adversity. I think the toughest thing is when there’s an option to transfer, when things get hard, we hurt the resilience of our young players. So I want to learn through that and understand how they grew throughout their ordeals. And that doesn’t mean we would eliminate everybody, but we want to know what’s coming in the building and what we need to lean into because I think we have to pick up some of that education on our side.”
General managers like the Bears’ Ryan Poles want to see how players react to adversity. (David Banks / Imagn Images)
Multiple coaches and general managers said they have begun to approach prospect evaluations similarly to how they gauge the factors that motivate free agents.
“We evaluate them as football players, not on how much money they make,” Tampa Bay Buccaneers coach Todd Bowles explained. “Their work ethic and everything else will tell us everything about how much they want it. So we stick to that route right there, and the best players that come to the top and the other guys will kind of sort themselves out.”
Said Dallas Cowboys coach Brian Schottenheimer, “You ask a lot of questions, but really, you watch the film and we show examples of them, maybe loafing, and see how they handle that. And the guys that kind of get pissed off about it, you can tell that they love it, but the play style and the video never lies. And so I think you kind of start with that. And we do deep dives, talk to a lot of people, position coaches, guys they’ve trained with in the offseason. And there’s no stone unturned when you talk about looking into the background of these guys before you bring them in as part of your family.”
Donte Stallworth remembers the day like it was yesterday, although the practice at the University of Tennessee and his first encounter with teammate Jamal Lewis was 28 years ago.
The then-freshman wide receiver observed Lewis, a running back who was a year ahead of him, always practiced in sweatpants with his pockets hanging inside out, flapping along each side. Eventually, Stallworth asked Lewis about the peculiar fashion statement.
“He said, ‘You see this in my pockets? I have lint in my pockets. That’s all I have. I don’t have any money, and I’m trying to get it. OK?’” Stallworth recalled. “And I said, ‘OK, OK.’ So it was a little extra motivation for him. Obviously, we wanted to play well; play well for our team, play well for our fans and coaches, and play well for ourselves. But for many of the guys that have aspirations to get to the NFL, that (money) was an extra incentive.”
Lewis did wind up making it to the NFL as a first-round pick in 2000, and Stallworth followed him as a first-round selection in 2002. This year — 24 years after his own combine experience — Stallworth accepted an invitation to attend the event as a mentor for wide receiver prospects. In talking to his temporary charges, he couldn’t help but notice the differences and similarities between his journey and theirs.
Stallworth chuckled, noting that most of the wide receivers he worked with weren’t even born when he went No. 13 to the New Orleans Saints. Aside from the athletes from Tennessee, where he often attends games and practices, few prospects even knew who he was. Still, the majority displayed an eagerness to hear about his experiences and gain advice on how to approach the next chapter of their lives, Stallworth said.
“Obviously, I didn’t have NILs back then, but when you bring money into the situation, especially the type of money that these guys are getting in college, as teenagers, as very young adults, it does have a different impact on their psyche coming in,” Stallworth said. “But I think the players today are definitely still hungry.”
Although the next crop of NFL talent may never experience the desperation that Stallworth and his peers experienced, they have their own sources of motivation, he predicts. Some may worry that the transfer portal has robbed athletes of valuable lessons in resilience, but this crop of talent will soon experience and learn from a slew of other teaching moments at the highest level of their sport.
“This is indeed a business,” Stallworth warned. “Yeah, you were making money in college — and a lot of money for a lot of them — but this is the NFL, and it is completely different than college for a number of reasons. … Once they get around the other NFL players, and everyone’s making money, or at the very least once they get into an NFL camp — to an NFL organization — then if they’re not 100 percent tuned in or turned up, the veterans around them — those guys don’t give a s—. They don’t care about money or any of that. They just care about, ‘Can you help us win?’ So, that will resonate with them 100 percent, and they’ll be OK.”