Grading Talent the Big Tuna Way

Last night ESPN ran an interesting behind-the-scenes look at how American professional teams typically evaluate talent, with special guest former National Football League executive and head coach Bill 'Big Tuna' Parcells. The context of the show was the league's upcoming college player draft, the annual exercise where the league's teams assess, grade, and ultimately select from 5-10 players each to 're-supply' the talent on their teams. It is a massive, high-stakes, expensive, and critically important recruiting, assessment, and alignment exercise.

Parcells' resume and achievements as a successful coach, and talent evaluator are solid - he served in very senior roles at several NFL organizations, winning two Super Bowl Championships as the Head Coach of the New York Football Giants. 

In the show Parcells' shared some of the talent selection criteria and thought processes that organizations that he was a member of, and in general, most other teams tend to follow when making player selections in the league's annual college player draft. Some of the criteria and processes were fairly obvious, and would apply generally to any talent selection or recruiting context, (players who had been kicked off their college team for disciplinary reasons should be avoided), but some of the other concepts Parcells discussed perhaps are not so apparent to casual observers, and just might have some additional applicability to more conventional talent selection processes.

Here are three Talent Evaluation ideas straight from the Big Tuna:

1. Understand the predictors of success (some are not so obvious)

In NFL football every team measures and grades the basic and easily understood physical characteristics of potential draftees, (height, weight, strength, speed), but during the show Parcells mentioned a few not-so-obvious keys he assesses, (e.g. for the position of cornerback, length of the player's arms). For potential quarterback prospects, Parcells insisted he only wanted players that actually graduated from college, as he felt it demonstrated intelligence, and more importantly commitment. 

The larger point is every competitor has access to the same talent pool, the basic and obvious assessment criteria are widely known and universally adopted, so finding the less clear and more predictive evaluation criteria that other teams may not have discovered is one of the ways to claim some advantage and make better selection decisions than the competition.

2. Make sure everyone involved in Talent selection understands these predictors

Once the criteria is established, and a process to collect and assess these criteria developed, Parcells emphasized the critical need for everyone involved in the talent selection process to understand the criteria, and consistently grade to the criteria. From scouts, to assistant coaches, to even the team owner, the definition of what a top candidate looks like has to be understood by everyone. There are so many players to assess, that no one member of the organization can possibly 'know' every candidate, so the selection process becomes a team effort, and the talent selection team has to have that common ground for any chance of success. Talent is talked about in the common language of the team's assessment ratings, and no conversation about talent fails to reference these assessments.

3. Know yourself

Parcells described a common acronym used in football draft processes, NFU, which means 'Not For Us'. This term is assigned to players that the strict adherence to positional capability assessments or past production in the college game might indicate are good candidates and should be considered in the selection process. But these NFL players have raised some concern off the field, of their attitude, style, work ethic somehow will not be a cultural match to what the organization is looking for. Parcells strongly advises teams to know themselves, know the style they want to play, the kinds of mental makeups that players need to have to 'fit' on the team, and to avoid the temptation of selecting players with fantastic physical skills that might not 'fit' otherwise. These kinds of gambles rarely work out, and they are the ones that get coaches and talent evaluators fired.

But in the end, despite incredibly detailed and complex processes for physical measurement, tests of intelligence, and well-documented and easily reviewed past performance in college football, selecting players for NFL teams is still and imperfect process. So-called 'can't miss' top prospects often fail to live up to expectations, while others deemed marginal prospects once vetted by the traditional processes end up as star players.

Having a system and some ground rules to follow, to find ways to uncover predictors your competition may have missed, and perhaps most importantly a deep and confident organizational self-awareness are a few ways our pal the Big Tuna offered up to try and land more Peyton Mannings and less Ryan Leafs (inside football reference, Google it).