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[h=2]What Anonymous Scouts Had To Say About Five Cowboys Rookies[/h] By One.Cool.Customer @OCC44 on May 21, 2016, 12:00p 72
Every year for the last 15 years, Bob McGinn of the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel has been polling personnel people before the draft. McGinn uses the results of those polls to rank draft prospects at their respective positions and spices up the rankings with comments from anonymous scouts.
The comments from these scouts can be effusive in their praise for a prospect but can also be damning indictments of various aspects of a prospects game/personality/traits. Taken by themselves, they likely provide a distorted picture of a prospect, but taken together, they begin to form a picture of what the scouting community may have thought about a given prospect.
With the draft firmly behind us, we revisit what McGinn and the scouts had to say about the players the Cowboys drafted. And we kick things off by looking at what McGinn wrote about Ezekiel Elliott in his introduction to the 2016 running backs.
Every year for the last 15 years, Bob McGinn of the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel has been polling personnel people before the draft. McGinn uses the results of those polls to rank draft prospects at their respective positions and spices up the rankings with comments from anonymous scouts.
The comments from these scouts can be effusive in their praise for a prospect but can also be damning indictments of various aspects of a prospects game/personality/traits. Taken by themselves, they likely provide a distorted picture of a prospect, but taken together, they begin to form a picture of what the scouting community may have thought about a given prospect.
With the draft firmly behind us, we revisit what McGinn and the scouts had to say about the players the Cowboys drafted. And we kick things off by looking at what McGinn wrote about Ezekiel Elliott in his introduction to the 2016 running backs.
Several personnel people said Elliott was the best back to enter the NFL since Adrian Peterson in 2007 largely because he has no weaknesses.
"Don't resist, just take him," one scout said. "He belongs in the top 10, maybe the top half dozen. He's got the whole package."
Elliott runs, catches and blocks equally well and at an elite level, but what really sets him apart is brainpower.
He scored 32 on the 50-question Wonderlic intelligence test. The average score of the first running backs taken in the last 10 drafts was 17.2.
Other than Steven Jackson, the first back off the board in 2004 who scored 28, almost none of the leading backs have even approached Elliott's score in the last 15 years.
"They rave about him," another NFC personnel chief said of the coaches at Ohio State. "Not many college backs are really good in protection. He really is (special)."
In addition to the quotes from three anonymous scouts, McGinn features in his ranking articles, he also offers up a few factoids for each prospects. Here's the collected wisdom for Zeke Elliott:"Don't resist, just take him," one scout said. "He belongs in the top 10, maybe the top half dozen. He's got the whole package."
Elliott runs, catches and blocks equally well and at an elite level, but what really sets him apart is brainpower.
He scored 32 on the 50-question Wonderlic intelligence test. The average score of the first running backs taken in the last 10 drafts was 17.2.
Other than Steven Jackson, the first back off the board in 2004 who scored 28, almost none of the leading backs have even approached Elliott's score in the last 15 years.
"They rave about him," another NFC personnel chief said of the coaches at Ohio State. "Not many college backs are really good in protection. He really is (special)."
Ezekiel Elliott, Pos. rank: 1 |