A scout’s life

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• By Richard Davenport
• 6:00AM on August 22nd, 2008

Also on Tuesday, I featured football scout Randy Rodgers, who has more than 50 major colleges as clients. Based out of Austin, Texas, Rodgers coached 29 years on the college and high school level. He served as the recruiting coordinator at Illinois and Texas under Coach John Mackovic.
Rodgers helps streamline the recruiting process with information on prospects throughout Texas.  He identifies athletes he thinks schools need to look at.
“We’re trying to help them become more effective in focusing on the guys they should be recruiting and try and reduce their lists down so they can spend quality time recruiting,” Rodgers said. “It’s also giving high schools kids more opportunities. I’m going to see more kids than any one college staff individually.”
Rodgers praised the Arkansas coaching staff for their efforts in recognizing the top juniors in the state.
“I think one of the secrets in recruiting is the early identification of prospects,” Rodgers said. “Especially when you’re evaluating and offering and trying to verbal commitments out of juniors, you better know about them early in the game. This staff clearly jumped in with both feet and worked hard to learn who the top kids were in Texas. I’ve always felt that Arkansas would be a big player in East Texas because when you get into the 903 area code, Fayetteville may be closer than several universities in Texas.”
Part of Rodgers’ ability to market himself is rooted in NCAA restrictions on college coaches regarding when and how often they can be on the road evaluating talent. Essentially, Rodgers is like having another coach on the staff.
“I watch a lot of practices, watch game, talk to coaches, watch off-season,” he said. “All the things a real coach would do when he’s allowed on the road.”
Highlight tapes of prospects can help college coaches evaluate talent but game tape provides a more fair look at recruits.
“First of all, if you see a kid’s highlight and don’t like him, you’re not going any farther, if you do like him, you get an actual game tape to see consistent play.,” Rodgers said. “I think a highlight tape helps a coach decide if he wants to go forward recruiting the kid. I think its huge mistake to recruit a kid just based on his highlight tape.”

Rodgers said defensive backs prospects are without question the most difficult to judge.
The secondary is never on the tape,” he said. “They’re on the tape when they line up to snap the ball and when the play starts the camera always stays with the ball. If it’s passing play, which you want to evaluate secondary kids on, the ball is in the hands of the quarterback which is going into a different direction from the DBs and they never show up unless the ball is thrown in their area. There’s no question that defensive backs are the hardest to evaluate.”