CFL.ca
Teams around the Canadian Football League are hard at work preparing for the upcoming CFL combines. Typically franchises enter the Combine with hours of assessment, grading and film study already completed.
For the most part, each new draft cycle begins at the CIS East West Bowl every year where scouts get an up-close look at the next crop of talent coming out of Canadian universities. Player evaluators also keep a close eye on NCAA schools for Canuck pro prospects. Throughout the university and college seasons on both sides of the border CFL scouts are visiting campuses, taking in live games and talking to coaches and teammates about potential draftable players.
Each team has a file – varying in size – filled with notes on each player that is eligible for that year’s draft. Using that information personnel staffs whittle the list down to players they actually want to watch on film in the off-season. If scouts believe a player has any chance to play in the CFL they will watch his tape.
Essentially, those athletes have made it through the first step of the grading process. After that, those prospects get studied in-depth, but every front office approaches that process in a unique way.
One CFL team divides up position groups for watching tape. Each evaluator will pull out any play – positive, negative or anywhere in between – that catches their eye that could possibly be made a part of a film cut-up for each player. For this particular team, they put together a final collection of 20 plays that should paint an accurate picture of a given prospect. Then the whole scouting department will get together for a week before the combines to watch all the cut-ups, talk about each player and stack their rankings board.
“Every player is going to have a 20-play cut-up that summarizes the good, bad, ugly or whatever you think of that player,” a CFL general manager said. “We want to have all these cut-ups done before we go to these combines so that we can go into them with a real good idea of each player.”
A different CFL franchise uses cutups as well, but they don’t limit the number of plays added to the reel for any one player. Team personnel evaluators get involved to varying degrees in this front office, some watch the cut-ups made by the main Canadian scouts while others prefer to watch entire games. And the coaching staff watches the cutups to rank players by the way they see them fitting into their schemes.
“This year it’s probably closer to 100 kids that we’re evaluating, that’s a little more than it’s been the past few years,” a scout from this team said. “That’s not to say it’s 100 high-level kids that are all going to be starters one day, but it’s players that could potentially develop and help a team in some way.”
Sometimes there are lots of positive plays in a cut-up while other times it might be filled with negative plays – it’s different for each player. Through this team’s process, evaluators keep going back to the film and adding plays to the cut-up as they work through all the film they need to feel comfortable with their evaluation of a single player.
“From there you can take personnel and coaching grades and come up with our rankings,” a scout said.
Another CFL team attacks the film evaluation in a whole other way: everyone in the personnel department watches as much as possible on every player.
“Everybody needs to at least have a peek at every guy. Too many times elsewhere where I’ve been, one guy will watch a player and reject him,” a CFL general manager said. “But other people will have seen that same player in a different game and saw that there was something there.”
After each man has crunched all the film possible on their own, the group sits in a room to watch players in-depth, and not just a select number of clips. This franchise watches at least two or three games together. 
“For us it’s really a minimum of three people and for the most part it will end up being four to five people with a grade on the majority of the players, before we sit in there as a group,” the general manager said.
After that meeting, each talent evaluator puts their grade on a player and the board is stacked based on the entire personnel staff agreeing on where each prospect should be ranked.
As one scout said, “It’s a ridiculous amount of time that you spend watching film.” But the eye in the sky is the most important tool used to evaluate and grade prospects. That ensures cowboy remotes will get quite the workout in the time leading up to the combine so teams can zero in on the players they like from the tape.
“You hope the guys you’ve watched on film that you like show up and test like pros,” a general manager explained. “If all the notes are positive and he runs and tests really well, that solidifies that a player can play in the CFL. On the flip side, let’s say you like a player on film and everything is really good about him, but he shows up and doesn’t test well, now he drops down in your eyes. But you still like him on film, so you go back and re-evaluate the player because athletically he’s going to really struggle in the CFL, and you have to weigh that. Then let’s say there is a player who’s film is bad, and you just don’t like him, but at the combine he tests through the roof. Then you go back and say there’s something athletically about this kid, he can play in the CFL, but why is his film not very good? Let’s figure that out.”
In a perfect world, the prospects that CFL teams like on film will show up and confirm what scouts have seen on tape: that they’re ready to make the jump to the CFL
Although, it’s seemingly never quite that easy and that’s why so much rides on the entire performance by an athlete at the National CFL Combine.
