NFL's custom scouting systems tell the story of the sport's changing technology

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Illustration: Kelsea Petersen / The Athletic; Steph Chambers / Getty Images, Kayla Wolf / Imagn Images, David Jensen / Getty Images, Petre Thomas / Imagn Images Share articleIn the early 2000s, if Tony Lazzaro wanted to make a film cutup of a draft prospect for a coach, first he’d have to borrow VCR tapes of that player’s games — sometimes from the college — and sit in front of his television with a pen and notebook in hand. He’d write down the time stamps as each play he wanted to highlight began, mark where each ended, and then give a list from all the separate tapes to a video specialist to manually splice together. Lazzaro, the vice president of technology and research for the Denver Broncos, is now only a couple of clicks away from any video he needs — and from more film cutups, data, player profiles and scouting evaluations than those rooms full of tapes and notebooks could ever hold. Like many NFL teams, the Broncos use an internal digital system to link across coaching, scouting and executive departments. That connectivity is especially important during the scouting and pre-draft process. Their system, nicknamed “FIS” (an acronym for “football information system”), also becomes their evaluation center. Lazzaro helped build FIS into its current form over his 25 seasons in Denver; it’s among the more advanced internal scouting systems in the NFL, and its evolution is a mirror for the sport’s technological progress. “It’s kind of a one-stop shop for everybody,” Lazzaro said. Every piece of information the team might want about any player — from those already on Denver’s roster to incoming draft prospects — lives in FIS. So do current and historical scouting metrics and grades (on the Broncos’ own and other teams’ players), medical notes, film and even salary-cap and contract details. It aggregates scouts’ reports on players into player profiles, which include sections for prospect film, testing and medical data, advanced information such as player movement/GPS data, personality and psychological evaluations. It can run analytical studies based on questions asked by coaches and scouts and can even produce player comps (the Broncos playfully call these “clones”). Any scout or coach can pull up any prospect in FIS to access this information in one place, instead of in separate reports or programs. “A lot of teams (separately) have an app for pro scouting, an app for college scouting, an app for video. Ours is all built into one; that’s not easy to do,” Broncos general manager George Paton said. “Our college scouts can go to a school, have their system open, and they can just click on a player and then watch video. You don’t have to go to (an external vendor).” Teams build programs such as FIS in part because they want to save time during the pre-draft process; “all in all, everything we do (now) is more efficient,” Paton said. Advanced internal scouting systems can sort massive amounts of information on prospects and automatically organize the evaluations and grades the scouts, coaches, medical staff and analysts input as well as data compilations. In draft meetings, any member of the Broncos’ group of evaluators can open FIS and click on a player profile, where they will see an aggregation of every scouting report, data point gathered and comparative assessment the group has ever made on that player. They can see all of his film, including packages of situational film (a receiver running routes against man coverage, for example, or an outside linebacker rushing on third down). Coach- and scheme-specific preferences have been programmed into FIS and can also sort players, the product of detailed communication between coach Sean Payton and Lazzaro’s staff (for example, height thresholds for running backs or length of frame for receivers). Payton, his GM said, is so interested in what the analytics team builds that he might ask Lazzaro “100 questions in three days.” The information is all packaged into digestible tabs and even small pictures within the scouting reports called “tags” or “alerts” that many NFL scouting departments use as shorthand to describe players instead of the wordy written reports of another era. It means they can make faster decisions and have more information to do so — including organizing their digital draft boards. “Back when I first got into scouting, it was all magnets,” Paton said, smiling. “Your draft board (was) magnets. “I haven’t used a magnet in 10 years.” FIS had to evolve constantly to remain a relevant tool as technology in the NFL advanced. So did its architect, Lazarro. “I’m old enough that the first piece (of the technology evolution) was ‘computers,’” he said, laughing. Lazzaro, 50, is a pioneer of football technology and systems. A finance major at Colorado State, his open disinterest in that career path was recognized during his senior year by an adviser, who encouraged him to pursue something he actually liked. So he began cold-calling sports teams and got an internship with the San Diego Chargers. Lazzaro noticed the IT professional there was totally overrun by his workload because he was trying to build the scouting department a system that could keep track of all of its prospects and scouting reports — while he also worked on cybersecurity, newly online bookkeeping and ticket sales software, keeping their computers running in general and other office tasks. So Lazzaro took over that scouting system as an intern and began to add to it, becoming hooked on the building process. After his internship ended, he reached out to the Broncos — then led by general manager Ted Sundquist — looking for full-time work. Sundquist was an Air Force Academy graduate who wanted more technology in football after working with some advanced military devices. By the time Lazzaro got to Denver, two of Sundquist’s scouts had already pieced together an internal system that was functional but needed development. Lazzaro dove in, weathering major disruptions in the sport’s technological timeline and evolving the early versions of FIS to similarly adapt. First, offices went digital, and personal computers became ubiquitous. Lazzaro spent a significant amount of his first decade in football technology digitizing mountains of written notes and manual processes and getting the team’s football operations online. The use of digital video was another key development. Teams were able to watch more film than ever of upcoming opponents, free agents and incoming prospects and could do so immediately at their computers. Video software that could quickly cut together film reels for game planning or player evaluation became ubiquitous, with some organizations contracting the work out to external companies and others — such as Lazzaro and the Broncos — building programs to do it themselves. Software that could help coaches more quickly draw and distribute their plays to staff was the first in a series of steps that ultimately allowed them to electronically match their plays to video. Then came a surge of data and interest in advanced metrics in sports, plus new data tools and publicly usable code and programming languages such as R and Python. “Having stuff in the public space, I think, really pushes us to move forward,” Lazarro said. “You’re crowdsourcing good ideas from everybody versus (doing stuff) on our own for years.” Twenty-five years in the field have taught Lazzaro that there will always be another technological catalyst. Right now, many NFL teams are exploring the use of large language models or AI. Two senior analytics and technology executives, one from an NFC team and one from an AFC team, told The Athletic their teams are using these programs but largely to speed up time-consuming tasks such as logging and transcribing medical information (an analyst or scouting assistant would direct an LLM to do this within a team-specific set of parameters). Other AI-driven programming (such as certain tools used by Next Gen Stats, including player tracking data) already exists within internal scouting systems. The goal for many NFL franchises is to integrate AI, or any new technology, into their existing systems — whatever form those take. Most NFL teams have an internal scouting system that at minimum can digitally store prospect profiles, metrics and scouting reports. Not all of them also serve as an overall hub for an organization like FIS; in fact, some only exist as interactive spreadsheets to help sort and organize players or help a team build its draft board and draft strategy. A technology expert from one NFC team noted its internal scouting system exists solely to organize, sort and rank prospects and their metrics. Yet that team has a significant investment in analytics and technology, so engineers build apps and other tools for evaluators that live outside that main system. This team has separately built mock draft simulators, trade analysis applications and even programs that help gather research on draft patterns and trends from other teams — so it can build strategy against them — where other advanced internal scouting systems might have these tools built in. The most advanced internal scouting systems often share specific qualities. They aim to guide a group of evaluators toward consensus — aggregating number grades and describing prospects using simple colors and pictures instead of sentences and paragraphs helps cut through the biases inherently found in adjectives, a scout’s presentation or a GM’s opinion. Within a large group of diverse opinions, a senior AFC technology executive said, an advanced scouting system should be able to identify and extrapolate small points of agreement. The act of drafting a player is the product of consensus reached among evaluators. They help answer questions using programmed tools — a coach can find every clip of a prospect doing one specific drill that applies directly to a schematic point, just by clicking a tab. “We’ll be watching tight ends, and Sean (Payton) will want to know run after catch. Boom, it’s right there,” Paton said. “It’s very intuitive.” Continuity is a key factor, too. Technology experts call it “data with depth.” An internal scouting system with years of input by the same evaluators (coaches, scouts, executives) creates a valuable bank of information with which new data can be compared. When teams are deciding which prospects fit their organization, callbacks to previous successes or failures inform the decision-making process. The Broncos changed general managers four times after Lazzaro’s initial arrival, and head coaches nine times. But he and his team (now composed of seven people; three front-end developers, three data and analytics specialists and a data engineer) mostly kept their programs intact. From regime to regime, words and sentences might have changed, but the alphabet never had to be completely rebuilt. “When you’re constantly changing regimes, it gets difficult,” Lazzaro said. He added, “You’re rebuilding tools instead of building new tools.” When staff get hired elsewhere, the same internal scouting system can’t simply come along with them in totality. Second-year Jacksonville Jaguars general manager James Gladstone used JAARS — the team’s “Joint After-Action Review System” — in Los Angeles when he was the Rams’ director of scouting. It was initially built over a decade ago by Jake Temme, now the senior vice president of football analytics in Jacksonville. JAARS was created as a communications hub and out of necessity as the team relocated back to Los Angeles from St. Louis. There were no set offices for scouts to meet, so Temme and IT specialist Ryan Garlisch developed a system that could house scouting reports, meeting notes and other relevant information about prospects, plus dialogue among scouts, coaches and executives. Over time, JAARS evolved into a highly advanced internal scouting system (it functions a lot like FIS). Rams general manager Les Snead has remained in place, and so has JAARS. It keeps gathering team and external data, and it keeps evolving. Gladstone brought Temme with him to Jacksonville to reprogram an existing internal scouting system already called “Blackwater” — to make it a lot more like JAARS. A year into that process, the system contains many of the same tools as its muse. But it will take time for Blackwater’s data to build similar depth — years of Jaguars employees evaluating their own players, their opponents and incoming prospects, using their own scouting language. They can’t take JAARS’ data and paste it into Blackwater. Keeping good players in their own building will give them physical and intangible traits to help inform them — and Blackwater — on future prospects. The search for innovation never stops, and, like coaches evolving their scheme, developers will look anywhere for a new idea they can turn into a tool for evaluators. Recently, two NFL teams told The Athletic that scouts kept mentally pairing players in meetings and asking aloud, “would you take this guy over this guy?” So they had their engineers develop a mobile app for their general managers that copied open-source code from a popular restaurant-ranking service. Their apps generated pairs of prospects in this year’s draft class from within the same position group, and asked the GM to rank them before presenting a new pair (sometimes including one player from a previous set). Neither team knew the other’s app existed, let alone they were essentially the same, but they were — because they borrowed the same code and were trying to answer the same question about the same prospects. But the two GMs will inevitably have varying evaluations of some players, even when using the same data and tools. The difference is the human. Spot the pattern. Connect the terms Find the hidden link between sports terms