100 Trillion NFL Draft Scouting Reports

Too Deep Zone is proud to bring you enough draft coverage to tide you through the next 200 billion years.

Exactly 12 years ago, I published The Hundred Trillion Scouting Report on now-defunct Sports on Earth. Readers dug it, but SoE’s servers went kablooie years ago, and I assumed the piece was lost. But QuirkyResearch on BlueSky pointed me to the proper archives, and I was able to unearth the text.

My first inclination was to pull a George Lucas and update a few of the gags. But most of the references are still comprehensible and rather funny. Also, it’s remarkable how little has changed in 12 years. So here is the original piece, from April 1, 2013, with only minimal edits and reformatting. Enjoy!

All NFL pre-draft scouting reports sound alike after a while. There is only so much you can say about the annual parade of archetypes: productive-but-undersized running backs, feisty 5-foot-9 cornerbacks, 300-pound run stuffers, unspectacularly effective Big Ten linemen and small-school specimens who dominated the South Central Ozarks Conference. Draft analysts grow weary and burnt out over the years; it's hard to find something new to say about this year's version of the typical mid-grade prospects.

The Hundred Trillion Scouting Report (100TSR) project was designed to take some of the burden off overtaxed draft experts. Based on Raymond Queneau's groundbreaking 1961 work "A Hundred Thousand Billion Poems," the goal of the Hundred Trillion Scouting Report project is to create a nigh-inexhaustible supply of ready-to-use player capsules that are utterly indistinguishable from the handwritten ones produced each year.

Queneau printed 10 14-line sonnets on cards that could be folded or cut so that each line could be replaced with any line from any of the other sonnets. In other words, there were 10 possible first lines for the poems, 10 possible second lines and so on. Queneau wrote just 140 lines of poetry, but through the miracle of exponentiation, those lines could be arranged into 10 X 10 X 10 X 10 X 10 X 10 X 10 X 10 X 10 X 10 X 10 X 10 X 10 X 10 = 100,000,000,000,000 different poems.

Fourteen lines is the ideal length for a fully fleshed out scouting report, from basic biographical data to strengths and weaknesses to conclusion. Why not apply Queneau's principles to the NFL draft? Simply write 140 boilerplate scouting observations, then leave it to the busy draftnik to randomly select one of 10 choices from 14 categories!

How great a resource is the Hundred Trillion Scouting Report project? The best draft sites include scouting reports for as many as 500 prospects. That's a ton of labor, and those reports get pretty standard after the first 30-40 players. At the rate of 500 reports per year, the 100TSR project provides unique reports for the next 200 billion years. Put another way, the NFL could hold a new draft every second of the day, with a fresh set of 500 newly eligible players, and the 100TSR would be able to provide fresh, non-repeating scouting reports until the year 7354. Try that, Mike Mayock.

Best of all, it's free. The 100TSR is like a life-saving vaccine: too valuable to patent and keep from the world. The full text of the project is outlined below: simply print the lines of analysis into 14 sets of 10 cards, shuffle, deal and slap a player's name at the top: You are in the draft business!

INTRODUCTORY THROAT-CLEARING BIOGRAPHICAL DATA

Every good scouting report begins with a biographical tidbit or two to let you know that the prospect is a real human who walks the earth, not a collection of isolated skills boiling over a Bunsen burner.

1. Two-time All-America defender.

2. Three-time All-Scandinavia offender.

3. Was on the watch list for the Davy Bedlitnikoff Award, given to the college player who appears on the most award watch lists.

4. Three-time All-SEC Honorable Mention, two-time Academic All-Conference Third Team Runner-Up, and four-time All-Conference Congeniality and Grooming Fifth Team Regional Semifinalist.

5. Former South Carolina "Mr. Football." Yes, they still do that. No, it is not still 1958.

6. Three-year starter at a major program, and if that is the most interesting thing we can say about him, you know the rest of this scouting report is nothing but bean dip.

7. Set the Big 12 record for the 400-meter hurdles (track and field).

8. Set the ACC record for the 4000-meter hurdles (snowmobile).

9. Holds his school's all-time FBS Division record for yards after catch. (School joined FBS division in 2007; started counting yards after catch in 2011.)

10. Played one year at a major program after transferring from a "junior college" to get his "grades" up after failing to meet "NCAA requirements" by attending "classes" and "learning things."

RANDOM BIOLOGICAL DETAIL

Further humanization of the prospect species: a note about his family, his background or some other off-field tidbit that probably should not be part of the evaluation process but nonetheless will be.

1. Married. Or at least, there is some gorgeous young woman that the cameras keep cutting to during all his college games as she cheers for him, so he is probably married. Boy, college has changed. Back in my day …

2. Arranged to be married, because that is how they do things in his remote, exotic village of ancestry (Gainesville).

3. Already has four children by five different mothers.

4. The son of some USFL guy from the '80s you barely remember.

5. The son of some player from the '90s, which makes you feel really old.

6. Adopted at an early age by a family whose mother looked nothing like Sandra Bullock.

7. Left on the doorstep of a church as an infant and raised by nuns, who also looked nothing like Sandra Bullock.

8. Spent 11 years in the Yankees organization and compiled a 7.67 ERA before suddenly discovering a passion for football.

9. Played power forward for two years before suddenly discovering a passion for being compared to Antonio Gates.

10. Just completed his missionary work, or was a Canadian fireman for a few years, or did some other pro-social thing which will make for a wonderful feature biography in the local newspaper before he is cut on July 28 to get the training camp roster down to 144 players.

BODY TYPE EVALUATION

The creepy, fleshy part where draft experts project their own body anxieties onto the prospects.

1. Sculpted from marble.

2. Has a muscular physique with ripped shoulders, knotty calves, tight glutes, thoughtful eyes, and please don't read anything unintentionally homoerotic out of these precise observations of an athletic young man by a middle-aged straight-identifying guy who has volunteered to spend hours watching him on video.

3. Molded from die-cast metal.

4. Has a bubble butt. Read some scouting reports: This is a real thing.

5. High cut, which is bad if you need to use leverage to push people around, but perfect for wearing a zoot suit.

6. Chiseled from stale Olive Garden breadsticks.

7. Bad-body athlete, which ironically would make him the Adonis of draftniks.

8. Dolloped from Hellmann's.

9. Fast-food conglomerate class action obesity lawsuit Exhibit A.

10. Body type evaluation quietly skipped because we never actually laid eyes on this young man and are just cutting and pasting observations from other scouting reports.

SPEED

You would think all of those 40-yard dashes would cover this without excess verbal baggage, but there is more to speed than just being fast.

1. Explosive speed.

2. Speedy explosiveness.

3. Fast explositivity.

4. More quick than fast.

5. More slick than quick.

6. Tremendous burst, but no finishing speed.

7. Accelerates slowly but bursts quickly after closing on his initial velocity.

8. Has an extra gear in the open field, which would make more sense if you knew how many gears he had in the first place.

9. Lacks elite speed (garden slug).

10. Sneaky fast (white guy).

JARGON ABOUT TECHNIQUE (POSITIVE)

We now get into the impenetrable part of the scouting report where everything switches into Draftnik Latin. First, a positive trait you can barely comprehend.

1. Runs downhill, which will make him ideally suited for negotiating the sinkhole in the middle of FedEx Field.

2. Uses his hands properly, a skill most of us master in kindergarten.

3. When covering receivers, snaps his hips, swivels his torso and bifurcates his pelvis.

4. Takes short, choppy steps, making him an interesting guy to walk behind in the airport.

5. Stacks and sheds well.

6. Stacks stuff in sheds well, thanks to his high school job at The Container Store.

7. Fundamentally sound tackler who breaks down, drives with his shoulder, wraps up the ballcarrier and does other things that we will discover cause horrible injuries in three years.

8. Very good at sifting, making him the ideal middle linebacker and pastry chef.

9. Has exceptional pocket presence. When you really listen to them, most of these scouting notes sound like double entendres.

10. Finds the soft spots in zone coverage, or as the real draft insiders call them, the fontanelles.

JARGON ABOUT TECHNIQUE: NEGATIVE

For every confusing attribute that is probably good, there is an equal and opposite confusing attribute that is probably bad.

1. Straight linish.

2. Flat planish.

3. Pats the ball before throwing, like it's a gassy baby or something.

4. Telegraphs his routes by rounding them off, dipping his shoulders at the end of his stem, and making a series of dot-and-dash noises at the line of scrimmage.

5. Does not high-point the football, opting instead to catch it.

6. Takes bad angles, like 666 degrees, or eleventeen pi radians.

7. Cannot disengage from blockers or boring conversations.

8. Does not anchor against the run or stow the mizzenmast against the pass.

9. Wall-off blocker, which is terrible, because if you can think of one metaphor for something incapable of serving as a hard-and-fast boundary or impediment, it's a wall.

10. Throws the football like a shotput, which is no big deal when he's really competitive and religious. Right? Right?

JARGON ABOUT TECHNIQUE: INCOMPREHENSIBLE

This line is like a secret handshake to other draftniks. It makes no sense to most humans, but to insiders it is a cross between "Hail, Fellow Guild Hall Denizen!" and "Don't F%^& With Me, I have 30,000 Twitter Followers."

1. Outstanding foot frequency.

2. Inconsistent waist wavelength.

3. Insubstantial ankle amplitude.

4. Finds the primary and secondary receivers well, but sometimes ignores the tertiary receiver, and has no clue about the quaternary or … sheesh, why did we use these terms; better fake it … the fifthintery receivers.

5. Fundamentally sound tackler who misses too many tackles and does not always tackle correctly.

6. Stares down the gun barrel.

7. Trash-talks the juice mixer.

8. Outstanding catch radius, which when doubled and multiplied by 3.14 yields his catch circumference, which stinks.

9. Bad ball athlete, which would be a huge problem if he played badball.

10. Lacks special qualities. (In other words, he never returned my phone call for that post-combine feature on his more famous teammate, so take that, Stedman Bailey!)

DISCLAIMER ABOUT COLLEGE SCHEME

The most important line in any scouting report, as it provides anecdotal evidence that the author actually watched the prospect for a few plays.

1. Played on Nick Saban's defense at Alabama, which means the NFL is a step down, and he should be writing a scouting report about me.

2. Played on Bear Bryant's defense at Alabama, which means he is at least 56 years old.

3. Played quarterback in a shotgun offense, so he never learned to take the center snap and drop the way NFL teams still think their quarterbacks do.

4. Played in the 2-2-7 defense perfected by coach Marla Gibbs.

5. Was the slot receiver in a spread offense at a mid-major, so those 353 catches as a junior equate to about 35 catches in the NFL.

6. Played in an offense with incredibly wide offensive line splits and never actually met his left guard.

7. Started his career as a zebra receiver on offense, then moved to the elephant position on defense, when he slid from the tiger slot over to the wombat technique. Figures to be a specialist in a safari.

8. Played for a coach who ran the waggle every single play because he liked to say "waggle."

9. Played wide receiver on a flexbone option team, so catching three passes in four years was equivalent to about 35 catches in the NFL.

10. Played offense for Wisconsin, where innovation has stood perfectly still since 1977.

COMBINE-SENIOR BOWL-PRO DAY ADD ON

Inserted after offseason events so the scouting report sounds "current" and the analyst sounds "informed" and "sober."

1. Turned heads at Senior Bowl week. Draft analysts are too busy networking the hell out of each other to actually face the field and see what is going on.

2. Opened eyes at Shrine Game practices. At least we stay conscious during Senior Bowl week.

3. Made a name for himself at the NFLPA Classic, or Texas vs. the Nation, or the South Dakota Frack Mining All Star Classic. He's not getting drafted, folks.

4. Pulled a muscle while stepping up to the podium at the combine.

5. Overslept a combine meeting with the 49ers. Actually, it wasn't a meeting at all. Jim Harbaugh just started banging on his hotel door at 4:45 in the morning, and when he finally answered after two minutes, Harbaugh just shook his head and said, "you failed."

6. Declined to work out at the combine, explaining that it was a silly process that accomplishes nothing, something every draft expert and many NFL coaches agrees with. Dropped 54 spots for his decision.

7. Completed 54-of-56 passes during his pro day passing drill, then successfully parallel parked on a street with no other cars.

8. Ran a 4.45 and a 4.54 unconfirmed (later confirmed as a 4.34 and 4.76) at his Pro Day after running a 4.73 and 4.37 at the combine, though the track at his pro day was notoriously fast, but there was a lot of wind that day and he was also getting over the flu at the Combine. Also, he's a punter.

9. Caught passes from Craig Krenzel at pro day. Yes, Craig Krenzel was hanging around pro day. No, he does not run a quarterback camp, and it wasn't Ohio State's pro day. He does some radio now, I think, but I did not see him with a microphone. It must have been a comeback attempt; he's 31 so I guess it's still possible. Nobody asked Krenzel what he was doing there. He just threw to the receivers and left in, like, a Hyundai Elantra or something. It was weird.

10. Did not attend pro day, as he is still not allowed with 60 miles of campus due to an NCAA violation involving a game jersey, an eyebrow piercing and a $25 gift certificate to Burrito Cantina.

WEASELLY BIT THAT UNDERMINES WHOLE REPORT

This is the "get out of jail free" card that allows the analyst to slink away from his opinions when the player starts making All-Time Epic Failure lists.

1. Has the tools to be an 11-time All-Pro, but also might not.

2. A boom-or-bust player who will go in the fifth round and be a spot starter.

3. The type of athlete scouts fall in love with, but coaches despise, and general managers pity-date a few times in the hope that he will get bored and go away on his own.

4. Has lots of upside, but plenty of downside, and not enough sideside.

5. Despite size and arm deficiencies, could become Drew Brees under the right circumstances, which include massive DNA replacement.

6. Could shine in the right system, like East Greenfield Realty Association's Sales Leader Program.

7. Passes the eyeball test, which is immensely painful.

8. If he plays like he did in the highlight reel his stepbrother posted on YouTube, he will be special, and he will spend his whole life with "Take it to Da House" by Trick Daddy playing in the background.

9. Will disappoint. We all disappoint. Life is just a parade of unfulfilled promises and unspoken regrets. I'm sorry, Allison; I should never have put my blog ahead of our relationship seven years ago.

10. Scouting report incomplete due to DVR malfunction during Belk Bowl.

NOTE ABOUT EFFORT

Working hard, or hardly working? The best way to tell is to watch tape of things that happened six months ago or to quote people who asked people who asked people whose source was the kid's agent.

1. Takes plays off.

2. Takes series off.

3. Took 2009-2011 off.

4. Only blocks when the camera is on him, which requires an amazing feat of clairvoyance.

5. Weight-room rat.

6. Film-room ferret.

7. Plays with a mean streak/plays recklessly. (These mean about the same thing, but you can switch the connotation in case you think the rest of the report is too positive or negative.)

8. Chews glass.

9. Munches thumbtacks.

10. Grrrrrrrrrr.

NOTE ABOUT CHARACTER

Enough about hundredths of a second in a sprint. Let's weigh this fellow's soul, shall we?

1. Kicked off campus for selling kryptonite to Lex Luthor.

2. Got into a fight outside a wine bar at 3:00 a.m., which will hurt his stock because tough guys don't go to wine bars.

3. Violated an unspecified team rule, possibly driving an SUV into a fraternity house or failing to salute the statue of Woody Hayes.

4. Unnamed sources question his maturity, fail to question their own.

5. Has a fake personality and phony smile (the Pro Football Weekly Cam Newton Memorial "Did They Really Print That?" Sentence).

6. Hard-nosed blue collar type. (Two guesses about ethnicity.)

7. Classy and well-spoken. (Zero guesses about ethnicity.)

8. Uses blubber well and has multiple words for snow. (Euphemisms for describing Inuit prospect, just in case.)

9. Was beloved by his coaches and teammates and already donates time and money to charity, but has lots of tattoos and is therefore undraftable.

10. Ran a 4.3-second 40. Across the river Jordan.

FINAL GRADE

Time to make a bold, clear statement, hoping that readers' brains will be pudding after the previous 12 sentences, rendering them unable to remember the final, probably erroneous verdict.

1. Likely Emperor.

2. Guaranteed 17-time Pro Bowler.

3. One of the best players in the draft. Your favorite team will pass him over for a pass-rusher with great combine numbers and four career sacks.

4. Likely lottery pick. (The Stephen A. Smith "First Take" Pre-Draft Special Grade.)

5. Will start exactly 73 career games and will make the Pro Bowl twice, once as an alternate. (Man, if I hit this one exactly right they will swear I was Nostradamus 10 years from now.)

6. Somewhere between a C+-minus and a high low B-minus plus.

7. Third-day pick, which makes you wonder why you read through all of that.

8. High-priority free agent.

9. Low-priority practice squad filler. (Future Packers starting running back.)

10. Someday, when he has two kids and a comfortable middle management career, he will stumble across this scouting report and chuckle about all the effort that was put into analyzing his footwork.

NFL COMPARISON

No scouting report would be complete without a comparison to an established player that can haunt the prospect throughout his career.

1. Joe Montana, after eating Jim Brown's still-beating heart dipped in Jack Lambert's sweat.

2. Ray Lewis. It is totally unfair to burden a rookie with these expectations, but feel free to lose all respect for him when he doesn't meet them.

3. Kyle Vanden Bosch, which is really weird because he is a running back.

4. Andy Levitre. Your rock-solid understanding of Levitre's playing style and NFL value should now allow you to form a crystal-clear image of this prospect in your mind that is more familiar to you than your own mirror reflection.

5. Somewhere between Brandon Mebane and Stepfret Williams.

6. Bill Osmanski. Ask your grandfather.

7. Manute Bol.

8. The Cowboys Team Bus.

9. A rich man's Weegie Thompson.

10. A poor man's Ernest Hemingway.

COMING SOON: The Hundred Trillion Prospect Slideshow. It's not just an ambitious project, but a business plan: Once readers start clicking, they can never, ever stop!

ACTUALLY COMING SOON: The Too Deep 96 continues once I figure out where it left off.

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