Third quarter, third and seven. The general manager is on the sideline a few yards behind the bench, where nobody’s paying attention to him.
His second-year linebacker is lined up in the middle of the defense. The offense shifts late. The linebacker sees it first, turns to bark the change to his safety, and slides over in time to sit on the route. Incompletion. Punt team on.
The crowd cheers the stop. The GM barely reacts. He watches the linebacker jog off, because that right there is why he took him.
Two springs ago, the tape on this kid was good but not the best in the class. What stood out was how quickly he took things in. In clip after clip he was the one pointing, moving people around, changing something before the snap. The GM took him a round earlier than most boards had him and spent a season answering for it.
That’s the job. You make the call in April, then wait a long time to find out if you saw what you thought you saw. When it shows up, it tends to show up in a moment like this one, small enough that you might be the only person in the stadium who notices.
We spend a lot of time at AIQ on the part of a player that’s hardest to see from the outside, how he takes in information and adjusts when the picture changes. We describe it so the people picking a player and the people coaching him start from the same picture. The best front offices already have a feel for this. We try to put language to it.
So alongside the coaches, The Read is spending the next few weeks with the people who build the roster. The ones who saw it in April and had to wait until a Sunday in October to be sure.
— Scott
Scott Goldman, Ph.D., is a clinical and performance psychologist and the creator of AIQ. He consults for the Golden State Warriors and has worked with NFL and NBA teams for over two decades.