Scout method

On the day of the big football game between the University of Missouri Tigers and the Cowboys of Oklahoma State, a football scout named Dan Shonka sat in his hotel in Columbia, Missouri, with a portable DVD player. Shonka has worked for three National Football League teams. Before that, he was a football coach, and before that, he played linebacker БЂ“ although, he says, БЂњthat was three knee operations and a hundred pounds ago.БЂ«Every year, he evaluates somewhere between eight hundred and twelve hundred players around the country, helping professional teams decide whom to choose in the college draft, which means that over the last thirty years he has probably seen as many football games as anyone else in America. In his DVD player was his homework for the eveningБЂ™s big game БЂ“ an edited video of the TigersБЂ™ previous contest, against the University of Nebraska Cornhuskers. Shonka methodically made his way through the video, stopping and rewinding whenever he saw something that caught his eye. He liked Jeremy Maclin and Chase Coffman, two of the Mizzou receivers ...»