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You’re a boxer.

You’re matched up against an extremely aggressive fighter. He’s not a reckless one, either.

He has a plan. He’s been taught well. He’s calculated. Most of all, he loves punching.

Hard.

What are your options? You can go blow-for-blow with him. It might work if you’re bigger, stronger, faster, and more technically skilled. Your night could also end with fewer teeth than you started with. You can Micky Ward it – sacrifice yourself early in the hopes he punches himself out.

Or you can use his aggression against him. Don’t just avoid. Convince him to throw the punches you want him to throw.

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Bully Football. It’s the term I use for physical players who take the action to their opponents. When friend Ryan Riddle saw Myles Jack in the Rose Bowl last month, he commented that he thought Jack looked small. Beyond a game-sealing interception, Jack didn’t come up big in the box score against BYU, either. But Jack sees a lot of time as a coverage ‘backer against some schemes and this was the case in the game Riddle and I saw.

Known for his coverage skill, there will be questions about Jack’s 6’0″, 230 lb. frame holding up in the NFL. It’s why I suggested we watch Jack against Virginia’s more traditional, pro style sets. From the Will and Mike roles, Jack displayed that those questions should be met with a finger to the lips.

When asked to play in those roles, Jack plays bully football against big men and wins. Watch the 45-minute episode below and you’ll see what we noted:

• Technically sound striking.
• Understanding how to pick a side.
• Skill at crossing the face of linemen as a run gap blitzer.
• A smart balance of remaining gap disciplined and showing aggression.
• Explosive strength.

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Linear thinking is important because it’s efficient, process-driven, and based around deductive reasoning. As the quote above says, linear thinking can also be limiting because it can only follow the path laid out by the starting point. In terms of the draft, I think it’s particularly helpful in identifying physical traits, as those things are observable, measurable, testable, and verifiable (and this goes for both the film and metrics sides of the spectrum).

Non-linear thinking is important because understanding physical traits is only part of the player evaluation puzzle. The other side of the coin is trying to understand the context of a player’s decision-making on the field. And trying to understand someone’s thought-process is tough. It’s even tougher when we think linearly and anchor ourselves to the starting point of our conclusion. That sounds paradoxical, but it’s often how this works: “This play is good/bad or shows this trait (starting point) because of X, Y, Z (observable information).”

The first installment of Every Play Tells a Story is a perfect example of why we need to use non-linear thinking when trying to figure out a player’s decision making. We’re going to remove all starting points. I’m ambiguous to the actual result. It’s not an example of something good, or something bad, or an example of a trait.

It’s peeling all the layers of information that the quarterback would have to account for and process through: what the play is trying to accomplish conceptually, and how both offense and defense dictate to each other. The difference is that I’ve got fifteen minutes to explain it. He’s got about fifteen seconds from the break of the huddle to the release of his throw.

Welcome to Every Play Tells a Story, starring Jacoby Brissett in his first drive of live action in two years.

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I. Edge rushers are the easiest position to project in the NFL Draft.

The skills required to play the position are easily discernible on tape. Jene Bramel and Andrew Parsons have probably done a better job than anyone at showing what to look for biomechanically from edge rushers on film. Further, the physical ability required to use those skills at a baseline level in the NFL is easily discernible through the athletic tests performed at the NFL combine. Where Andrew and Jene are excellent as describing translatable skills, Justis Mosqueda has created a metric named “Force Players” that passes or fails Edge rushers athletically based on Explosion and/or Agility in relation to their body’s density. The list of players who have passed and failed is stunningly accurate in projecting success.

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Even with a set of clearly defined and traits to look for and a system in which to filter their importance, quarterback scouting can still be really, really hard. That largely has to do with sample size and the amount of useable plays a quarterback has per game. I’ve said often that the NFL likes Jameis Winston because he’s a straightforward evaluation.

Every game he’s in has exposure after exposure of him showing these things – whether he shows these things in a good or bad way becomes almost secondary. The lack of nuance required to actually see the traits elevates him almost on principle, and that’s largely due to the style of offense that Florida State plays. I’ve never been a fan of the term “pro style” when describing a college offense, preferring to call them “traditional” offenses.

His offense plays at a normal pace, he takes drops from under center, and he’s not a threat as a runner. In turn, defenses respond by playing Florida State in a more traditional manner. You get more man coverage and confusing pre-snap defensive looks, tighter windows to throw into, more compressed pockets for the quarterback to navigate, etc.

Marcus Mariota sits on the other end of the spectrum. The way they play offense (and, in turn, the way defenses respond to their offense) vastly limits the amount of usable snaps per game you get from Mariota. He’s asked to make some “traditional offense” reads and throws (it’s not like their pass offense is just a million screens over and over), but the way that defenses play Oregon makes things incredibly easy on the quarterback.

Oregon’s offense is actually very easy to figure out from a theoretical standpoint. They want to use their no-huddle pace and spread formations to get the defense to declare their intentions pre-snap. Spread formations and the hurry-up tempo prevent the defense from clustering or disguising their coverages pre-snap (and the coverages tend to predominantly be zone as opposed to man).

When the defense goes into a two-high safety look, Oregon wants to run it (or combine play-action with Quarters/Cover Two beaters). Against one-high safety looks, they’re looking to combo their run game with horizontal stretches or screens in the short areas of the field (or they’ll run Four Verticals when they feel like taking a shot play). Again, a lot of these pass concepts are “traditional,” but often times Oregon is getting the perfect play-call in against a clearly defined coverage/front.

This doesn’t necessarily make Mariota a worse prospect; it makes him a tougher evaluation. You just have to search harder to find plays that display projectable traits, and because you’re dealing with such a smaller sample of usable plays, the answers can be inconclusive or even contradictory.

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When I heard Dan’s Hatman’s description of “trait-based scouting” on the Process the Process podcast, it reminded me a lot of the grading scale Andrew Parsons and I co-developed when creating the Draft Mecca website. We knew that until we actually sat down and listed all of the projectable traits each position shows andweighing the importance of each trait, we would forever be chasing flashes and potentially overvaluing or over-correcting based on a few good or bad plays.

Think of a grading scale like a Madden rating. In Madden’s rating formula, coefficients like “Speed” and “Awareness” correlate to a player’s overall rating. The higher you raise a player’s “Speed” rating, the higher his overall rating becomes and vice versa – and this is universal across almost all positions. However, each position differs in how much the coefficients affect the rating. For instance, raising an offensive guard’s Speed to 99 doesn’t have the same affect as raising a running back’s Speed to 99.

What we did was list all the specific and projectable traits each position has – essentially, determining “what” we were looking for in each position. We then assigned weighted values to each trait. We then assigned weighted values to each trait and it’s sub-categories. Some things are more important than others. Moreso than simply spitting out a numerical grade, it allowed us to see a players’ playing style in totality.

Dan’s wide receiver example in the podcast is a perfect illustration – you might have three wide receivers with the same level of “goodness” in a vacuum, but they succeed and fail in vastly different areas. Visualize a player’s skill set like a Mockdraftable web: the more spikes a player has, the more projectable traits and integrated skills he has. However, you don’t need a full web for a prospect to be good. You mainly just need to see some spikes in important areas.

Long story short, this is a breakdown of the traits that matter to me when scouting quarterbacks. The bold-underlined portions are the major categories. Each one has sub-categories (and some of those have sub-categories as well). Again, if you put together a formula of how to weight each of these traits, you can alter how much each one affects the total overall grade. If something is italicized, it means it’s the most important part of that category (for example, Pocket Comfort is the most important of the major categories. It will have the highest impact on the overall grade, and Eye-Level carries the most weight of the sub-categories inside of thePocket Comfort.)

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