Before the arrival of the VCR and personal computers in the early 80’s, Football Scouting and Game Planning was primarily a manual process, and “live scouts” were an integral part of that process, often traveling long distances to view games “in person”, with pencil, paper and sometimes a tape recorder in hand. “Film exchanges”, when they took place, usually involved trading just one, then “state of the art” 16mm game film to give a coaching staff two games to “break down”.

The number crunching was often done manually, since computer use during the 70’s was limited mainly to large universities, and smaller schools that were geographically close to them. Before scouting information was ready to be “processed as data”, it had to be translated into a form that was optimized for the mainframe computer data processing centers of the day. Early adopters used punch cards to code data, which were then taken to data processing centers like those most commonly found at large universities. Mainframe computers generated statistical and tendency “printouts” on “computer” paper using dot matrix printers, much like those used in the early PC years on Apple and IBM PC’s.

Since computer processing resources were expensive and limited, it was often necessary to translate names for Offensive Formations, Play Names, Defensive Fronts and Pass Coverages into a system of codes that preserved “scarce” memory and speed up processing.

It’s not surprising that what is likely the very first computer scouting application was developed in the Washington DC area by Bill Witzel, an early computer entrepreneur who first showed his program to a young University of MD Assistant Football Coach named Lee Corso – the same Lee Corso that is currently a personality on ESPN’s College Game Day. Corso liked the idea, but the rest of the staff was not on board, and Witzel took his creation to the nearby Washington Redskins, where Defensive Coach Ed Hughes used it during the 1966 season, finishing second to Vince Lombardi’s Green Bay Packers in Defensive rankings. Witzel’s system was adopted by eight more NFL teams the following season, and computer use in football has been on a steady upward trajectory ever since.

Ironically, Corso’s next stop was the US Naval Academy, where he worked with Steve Belichick, father of current NFL Head Coach, Bill Belichick of the New England Patriots. As Corso tells it, “young Bill” was interested in the analytical part of the game at a young age, and cut from the same cloth as his father, who wrote one of two early books on the subject of football scouting (the other being George Allen). Its unclear from either book to what extent computers were used to crunch numbers, however.