"If people want to ask me questions about the draft, then they have to worry about the credibility of my answers."
-- Late NFL personnel man Jim Finks
Who will the Steelers draft tomorrow?
Don't ask Kevin Colbert, their director of football operations. Why would he tell you?.
"I learned a long time ago," he said, "way back when I was in Miami, one of our coaches said, 'I don't talk to my friends this time of year so I don't have to lie to them.'"
NFL teams spend upward of $2 million annually to prepare for the draft, which takes place tomorrow and Sunday, and then millions more to pay the players they take in the seven rounds. Obviously, they consider the voluminous information they gather sacrosanct and go to great lengths to guard it.
Since Colbert's arrival from the Detroit Lions in 2000, he has forbidden his scouts from talking to the news media in the months before the draft. Coach Bill Cowher issued a similar edict to his staff.
The two men had one predraft news conference (Monday), and only one prospect's name passed through their lips -- Colbert acknowledged that Miami running back Willis McGahee is recovering from knee surgery, the most common knowledge of any prospect.
"We spend a lot of money and a lot of time putting this together," Colbert said. "You can't be free with the information. We understand as an organization and a league, the draft creates a great amount of attention for the league. We have to be sensitive to that while also being sensitive to your own organization in protecting the information that's going to help you be successful.
"You have to walk a fine line."
The Information Age
That line has become more difficult to walk in the age of mass media and the Internet. It's practically impossible to keep information under wraps in-house because scouts and coaches are always looking to better themselves, and that means forging friendships with coaches and personnel men from other teams.
"You're in a people business, and people talk," said Mike Hagen, college scouting supervisor for the Atlanta Falcons.
The Steelers, for example, fired a secretary last year, believing she had been indiscreet with some of their draft information. Several years ago, Jacksonville Coach Tom Coughlin fired a scout for mailing the Blesto combine scouting package to another team. Coughlin found out about it when the package came back to the Jaguars in the mail because it did not contain enough postage.
It did not help the Jacksonville scout save his job when he told Coughlin the other team had mailed him the National combine scouting package.
Each NFL team has a scouting staff, some larger than others, and most teams also belong to one of the two scouting combines in the league, Pittsburgh-based Blesto and National. Every team that belongs to a scouting combine receives that combine's information. Many times, so do other teams who do not subscribe to the information.
Jack Butler, a former Steelers defensive back who has headed Blesto for more than 30 years, saw his ratings pop up in USA Today in the 1980s and was furious about it. So, he began to code each rating sent to each team, slightly changing a weight of one player.
"We spend so many dollars, and others can buy it for 50 cents in the newspaper," Butler groused.
His coding, though, did get one Philadelphia Eagles scout fired after his coded list appeared in USA Today.
Teams pay hundreds of thousands of dollars for Butler's information, and he knows how easily it can be passed from one scout or coach on one team to a buddy on another.
"We have 11 teams, and everybody uses a laptop," Butler said. "They send me a disk, and I e-mail these reports to the teams. I know anybody in the organization can e-mail it to someone else."
Ernie Accorsi, general manager of the New York Giants, is a Jim Finks disciple when it comes to giving out information about the draft -- and clamping down on those who do.
"It's indefensible for anyone to do that. I know Kevin is hot over that, and so am I; it gets very aggravating and it goes on. People giving away these scouting reports is a sacrilege. You don't want your competitors to know what you know. We don't give out game plans, either."
Accorsi once fired a member of his organization -- a team other than the Giants -- because he caught him on the phone giving other teams information on draft day.
"It's a friendship thing," Accorsi said. "We walked in on him. He was missing all the time. He said, 'I was just helping a friend.' You can't have that. Everyone is working like heck to win."
Masters of deception
For years, scouts have had an unholy alliance with their coaching staff. The scout's job is to assess players year-round, and the coaches only jump into it for a few months when the season is over. Many personnel men are leery of the coaches for two reasons -- they believe they have loose lips and they don't trust their opinions about college players, many of whom they've only seen on a few videos.
"You worry about coaches who have their own network of information on the phone, nonchalantly giving all this information away," said Tim Rooney, a former scout with the Steelers, Lions and Giants. "They start to get involved in the draft process, and you worry about this information getting out."
They worry not just about their ratings getting out, but, more important, word of which players they are hoping to draft.
"You may like two players in the third round and hope one falls to the fourth," Tim Rooney said. "Obviously, if people find out you like a guy that much, they'll study him and put him higher and take him before you."
That happened to the Steelers in the second round last year. With the 62nd pick, they were prepared to draft BYU defensive end Ryan Denney and had him on the phone. But Buffalo's Tom Donahoe, fired by the Steelers two years earlier, swung a trade to move into the No. 61 spot and drafted Denney.
Although Donahoe denies any knowledge of the Steelers' intentions, they suspected he did and were furious. They fired a scouting department secretary over it.
"How would we know he was on the phone to Pittsburgh?" Donahoe said of Denney. "We didn't know that until we called him up. It was sour grapes."
Each NFL team is permitted to bring up to 20 prospects to their facility before the draft to inspect them, interview them and get more medical information. Teams such as the Steelers do not provide the list of invitees to reporters, although it often leaks out. Personnel men believe teams can draw a bead on their interests in certain players by examining the list of visitors.
George Young, the late Giants general manager, devised a partial solution to that. He would invite some prospects to New York just before the draft whom the Giants had absolutely no interest in.
"We would simply do it to throw off the scent," Tim Rooney said.
His cousin, Art Rooney Jr., did that with his own coaches when he headed the Steelers' personnel department. Rooney did not like when coaches joined discussions on prospects late in the process because he felt they were not informed enough and would merely disrupt things.
So he would send the coaches out of the office on long trips to re-inspect a prospect or two. The coaches felt good about doing something important, while Art Rooney merely wanted them away from the final evaluations taking place among the scouts back in the office.
Hoarding John Stallworth
Today, most teams have all the vital numbers on prospects -- height, weight, speed, bench press, vertical leap, etc.
"Having the information is one thing," Donahoe said. "What you do with it is something else. That's where the scouting aspect of it comes in and the administrative aspect -- OK, we have all these numbers on this guy, what does it mean? Where would we be comfortable drafting a guy?"
It does not happen as often anymore, but there are occasions when one team develops some real information about a prospect that no one else has. It happened before the Steelers drafted wide receiver John Stallworth in 1974. No one had a fast time on him, but Steelers scout Bill Nunn made a special trip to Alabama A&M and had him run on a better surface than the field there. Stallworth ran a faster time for Nunn.
While he was there, Nunn also acquired a highlight tape of Stallworth from the school. The A&M coach asked the Steelers to send it back to them when they were finished, so other NFL teams could see it.
"It was like one of those short subjects, all his best shots," Art Rooney Jr. said. "We had a lot of people who wanted us to send this movie on, because it was the best he played."
Rooney told Dick Haley, his right-hand man, to send the film back when he was done. A week later, Rooney found Haley watching the same film.
"I said to send that thing out," Rooney told him. "We have a responsibility."
"Oh, yeah," Haley replied. "I forgot."
Says Rooney today: "They hoarded the film. I think it ended up getting sent out so late that it didn't make much of a difference."
It did to the Steelers. They waited until the fourth round to draft Stallworth, who helped them win four Super Bowls, then made the Hall of Fame.
As the draft draws closer, more misinformation and rumors appear.
"The problem comes with all the last-minute, I heard, he said, he said stuff," said Tom Modrak, Buffalo's assistant general manager. "It kind of makes you lose focus if you let it. You have to check it out. If you kept a list of everything you heard in the last couple of days, it would be 50-50, some true, some not. That's not a real good credibility rate."
Modrak, who worked for the Steelers in the 1970s, '80s and '90s, has taken a true spy vs. spy vs. spy approach when he talks to people about college prospects.
"I just tell people what I think, the truth," Modrak said. "Ninety percent of those guys think you're lying anyway."
Ed Bouchette can be reached at ebouchette@post-gazette.com or 412-263-3878.
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