Anyone know the role of an advance scout in the NFL?

[Mooch]

The NFL allows a scout from the next week's opponent to sit in the press box and watch the game. Any idea what that advance scout does the majority of the time?

He sits there with a pair of binoculars trained on the coaching staff in an effort to steal play calling signals.

Totally legal. Accepted practice by ALL NFL teams.

So is prohibiting a team from videotaping the opposing playcallers kind of arbitrary in light of the allowed practice of "spying" that every team employs?

If the Patriots broke the rule, fine. The team accepts the penalty and moves on. But let's drop the hand-wringing and "holier than thou" crap. Every team does this in one form or another. Stealing signals is as much a part of football as the hike and the forward pass.

 

[FreeTedWilliams]

Football teams, from the NFL to High School, trade "game tapes" with opponents every Monday.

So this Monday, the Patriots send their coaches tape to San Diego and vice versa. The NFL has a system on the computer in which you can actually search video of any and all plays from something like the last ten years.
So if BB wanted to see Jets blits, he could sit in his office and type in Jets/blitz into his laptop and get them all.

Teams change their sideline signals every game, so taping them for future use would be futile. If they can somehow deciepher which coach is the "live" coach (they usually have at least two coaches, sometimes three giving signals), then extrapalate what the signals are.

Now once, you have done this, you would have to see the signal, and then within 10 seconds figure out what play to call, and what formation to come out in, which will not cause the defense to audible from the defense call from the sidelines, and get that play to Brady before the play clock expires.

Now all this is well and good, but think about Sunday's game, what were the "big" plays, a KO return, a 51 yard bomb (into triple coverage) out of a "heavy" (2 TE) formation, and then two long time consuming run on almost every down drives. None of which would seem to stem from stealing the defenses signals.

 

[naclone]

it's kind of like the league saying you can take a team's playbook and write down everything in it, but you can't photocopy the pages.

the pats are not guilty of stealing signals so much as they are guilty (allegedly) of VIDEOTAPING signals.

sorry, but i can live with that.

especially if you consider that videotaped signals are already widely available through the broadcast and coaches tape.

call me a homer, but this seems to be a technicality being blown up because it's the pats.