I don't know how many players are playing NCAA football on scholarship, but it must be well over 10,000. The majority don't make it close to the pros, but there are still so many teams and so many players that it's impossible to find all the hidden gems.
I was extremely interested in Dion Jordan going into the 2012 college season. I thought he had a rare combination of size, speed and fluidity in space that made him an unusually versatile potential "chess piece". Jordan was considered a 2nd/3rd round prospect at the time, and ended up going #3 overall in the 2013 draft.
Mackenzie Pantoja, a then-high school student and scouting prodigy who wrote draft profiles for NFLMocks.com and who is now an undergraduate at the University of Chicago wrote on our draft prospect thread in January of 2013:
http://www.patsfans.com/new-england...3-prospect-thread.914913/page-95#post-3321007 (post #1892)
And he was 100% right. Not a lot of people knew about Collins at that time.
It's to BB's credit that he puts in the legwork to go evaluate these kind of prospects, and that he can see past the media hype and rankings. It's also to his credit that he figured out how to use Collins effectively (whereas Miami tried to bulk Dion Jordan up and turn him into a full time line player, which took away his most valuable skill set and exposed his weaknesses).