Scout Team

The stressful thing about being on a scout team in college was that you were supposed to fail.

Freshmen, ineligible in 1959, made up the team and I was a graduate assistant and their coach at the University of Minnesota. I had been a member of the infamous scout team a few years earlier and hated it as much as these players did.

Every week you were the enemy of your own team. The varsity hated you if you were portraying Michigan because you were trying to take the Little Brown Jug away. And if you were pretending to be Iowa, you were hated, well, just because you were Iowa.

Here I was coaching a bunch of extremely skilled kids fresh out of high school that one year later would make up the bulk of a national championship team. Each of them wanted to be recognized quickly and to seize that chance with conviction. And yet they were supposed to lose convincingly every Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday afternoon of every week to the varsity because it would make the team’s upper classmen feel more confident and the coaching staff more self-assured because they had figured out a way to stop you.

After all, the reasoning went, if you couldn’t beat your own freshman team, how could you ever beat another varsity team?

The scout team couldn’t win. To win was to lose and to lose was to win. That’s just not American.

The guys would strap a piece of tape on their helmet with the name of the player they were emulating. Why we did that I’ll never know. When I played, I couldn’t care less about my opponent’s name. All I wanted to know was his number and his strengths and weaknesses. I suggested that change to the coach once and he told me “Not a bad idea, Jim” but we never changed it.

After a coach came home from scouting an opponent in person and only after successfully navigating a mine field of seventy-thousand fans to find a cab to get to the airport and a Saturday night flight home to Minneapolis, he would begin to assimilate the stats assiduously gathered in the press box that day and try to make some sense of them.

Every play was one sheet of paper in a thick loose leaf binder on which were all the categories necessary for review: down, distance, run or pass, hash mark, position on field, time left, formation, defensive alignment, weather conditions, etc., etc., etc. We were about as far away from computerization as could be.

You had until eight-thirty the next morning to come up with an intelligent scouting report clearly showing tendencies so at the morning staff meeting, plans could be formulated to defend against next week’s opponent. Material carefully arranged on the kitchen table and a bevy of sharpened pencils to record every third and long, every goal line play, every play run from the left hash mark, the right hash mark or from the middle of the field, the line of scrimmage, the multitude of pass routes, defensive schemes, all had to be laboriously recorded and tabulated. I generally got to bed by five am.

I remember one specific Sunday morning, arriving after three hours sleep at the assigned meeting time to make what I felt would go down in the annals of scouting reports as an Oscar-worthy performance, I was somewhat disheartened to hear my head coach, Murray Warmath, on the phone talking with Woody Hayes of Ohio State and saying, “Thanks, coach, you’ve told me all I need to know to win next Saturday.”

After all the work I had put in, I was now there solely to make sure I confirmed Woody’s observations. So, I made my presentation and I guess it corroborated Hayes pretty well because the only questioning I got from the staff was, “Hey, you’ve only accounted for 99.8% of the plays. What did they do the other one-fifth of one-percent of the time?”

I replied, “They took a knee, guys, and so should you.”

Monday afternoon, I gathered my youthful doomed denizens and went over the plays they were to run all week. As we grumbled through practice, these prized athletes envisioned another week of resigned futility lest they alarm their older brethren with any modicum of success.

We had a superb athlete, a six-foot-three, two-hundred and fifteen pound Adonis as our quarterback. A big, raw-boned African-American from North Carolina, he had only played six-man football at a segregated high school. He could throw the football seventy-yards like a rope, could snap the ball back to a punter so hard the coaches told him to take it easy, and he could outrun everybody with the style and grace of a thoroughbred. And here he was every week subjected to arranged losing. I wondered how I would ever be able to keep up his morale and improve his quarterbacking skills under these conditions.

I needn’t have worried.

The next year, to the surprise of us all, coach Warmath switched him to tackle where he became an All- American and then an All-Pro linebacker for eight consecutive years and maker of the mold for those who followed. His name was Robert E. Lee Bell and he became known as Bobby Bell, the face forever of the Kansas City Chiefs and a college and NFL Hall of Famer.

We survived the week, took off the following Saturday while the varsity was playing and felt a degree of solace and pride in watching them attack and defend with intelligence and fervor because of the work of our scout team.

A few years later while teaching English and coaching high school football, I was in the school library and overheard a Royal McBee salesman talking to the librarian about buying punch cards to keep better track of the library’s books. Before the widespread use of computers, some libraries used a system of small edge-notched cards in paper pockets in the back of library books to keep track of them

Edge-notched cards pre-dated computers and were not intended to be read by machines. Instead, they were manipulated by passing one or more slim wire rods through selected holes in a group of cards. As the rods were lifted, the cards that were notched in the positions where the rods were inserted would be left behind as the rest of the deck was lifted by the rods. Using two or more rods produced a more detailed result. Complex manipulations, including sorting, were possible using these techniques.

My thoughts ran back to those nights I stayed up so late to complete my manual tabulating of data, page by page, entry by entry, to come up with an opponent’s tendencies, the reason for scouting in the first place.

As he was leaving, I stopped the salesman and asked if the cards he had been discussing which had room to track eighty items had ever been used by football coaches to scout football games. He had no idea what I was talking about.

I explained to him the cards could be used to record all the details of individual plays and then by punching out the noted items, for instance, all the third down plays of seven or more yards run from the right hash inside the opponents’ thirty-yard line could be determined in a fraction of the time it was taking me to do the calculations by recording every play with my pencil and paper and then sorting them.

I could see the light bulb go on in his head but I never heard from him again.

It would still be years before computerized scouting of games would arrive.