The Bengals’ new-look scouting staff, trying to project the weekend’s cantankerous weather as well as sleek edge rushers, has converged at the season’s first major college all-star game for practices leading up to Tuesday’s East-West Shrine Bowl in Frisco, Texas.
Then, director of player personnel Duke Tobin hopes to skate through the ice to the Panini Senior Bowl in Mobile, Ala., for the workouts around the Jan. 31 game with some of his beefed-up staff’s new tools.
“More efficient and more eyes on more players,” says assistant general manager Mike Potts, who oversees Bengals’ college scouting. “Multiple looks at more players on both the college and pro side, and that’s through seeing them in person on visits and watching them on tape as well.”
That’s courtesy of three hires Tobin made back in the spring that included veteran NFL college and pro scouts Josh Hinch and Tyler Ramsey, as well as scouting research analyst Trey LaBounty, and they say they can see their work starting to bubble up as draft season eases into full boil.
Ramsey, back in his old stomping grounds that he canvassed for a decade with the Seahawks in the Mountain West, and Hinch, bringing his SEC experience with the Patriots to bolster assistant general manager Trey Brown’s deep roots in Alabama and Georgia, have been here before.
Yet no one’s quite sure if they’ve ever seen a guy like LaBounty on the scouting trail.
“I’m sure there are a lot of guys around the league that don’t have as well-rounded of a skill set as he has,” Potts says.
LaBounty, 25, once a preferred walk-on defensive end at Stanford and then a grad school tight end at Miami University who also happens to have two master’s degrees and majors in information technology while dabbling in program applications, has been both getting his feet wet and diving in.
You’ve got to believe he’s the first NFL scout with a master’s in “Data science with focus in social problems.”
“I give props to these guys. I’ve been really thankful that they’ve allowed me into the different processes and genuinely been willing to listen to my input,” LaBounty says. “I’ve got a different background from the technical aspect, and it has allowed me to come in and ask, ‘How can we streamline our processes and make them more efficient?’ And then what are the areas where we can also go in and create new ones?”