What the Fuck Am I Doing At the Senior Bowl?

I went to the 2024 Senior Bowl. I'm not entirely sure why.

Photo by Michael Wade/Icon Sportswire via Getty Images

I had more fun at the 2024 Senior Bowl, the 75th anniversary of the event, than I’ve had in months – and perhaps more fun than I’ve ever had at a Senior Bowl. I have no idea what I’m doing.

I have never felt less prepared to talk about an event I’m covering.

As a person who covers the NFL full-time with no knowledge of college prospects aside from what I get on my Twitter feed, the players that populate the National and American rosters are mysteries to me. Most of my experience in practice involves seeing a player with an incredible play and asking the person next to me who that player was.

Luckily, there are a number of people here with a wealth of information on even the most obscure prospects at the Senior Bowl. New Hampshire running back Dylan Laube has already developed a following here and I’ve learned that he primarily played lacrosse in high school. He seemed less concerned with putting New Hampshire on the map and more with hyping up former teammate and outgoing quarterback transfer Max Brosmer, who recently committed to Minnesota.

For a lot of people, it’s forgivable not to know much about Laube. It’s a lot less forgivable to be completely blind to the kind of player Jackson Powers-Johnson evidently is. He’s good!

When I write my Senior Bowl standouts I have to look up where a player is projected to go before I reference where the Vikings can think about drafting a player. Is that useful information to provide to readers? They seem to think so. In these situations, I try not to position myself as an expert and reference where the media consensus on a player is, something I have particular insight into, but it’s a very odd place to be in.

A good chunk of my reporting is tertiary – I’m learning second-hand about a player’s potential stock and re-reporting it, regurgitating without aggregating.

I can tell you which players performed well, and which players are earning “buzz” based off of conversations with draft experts, draft amateurs and team personnel. But that seems like a small return given the effort involved in a cross-country trip.

And pure evaluation is a poor reason to attend, too. As Jordan Rodrigue pointed out several years ago at the Athletic, teams can generate value simply by logging into the film app and reviewing the reps. I drew more of my insights from that than I did from the live practices.

There’s a certain imposter syndrome that I am struck with when it comes to this specific type of evaluation. It’s not that I can’t recognize that Jackson Powers-Johnson is absolutely dominant in the clip above – he is, and he showcases excellent upper-body strength, great balance and impossibly good recovery – it’s more that I had no idea who the Oregon center was a few days ago.

I can confidently say he had a great week. I can’t say with much confidence where he’ll go in the draft without checking resources like the Athletic, ESPN, CBS Sports and so on.

Guard Isaiah Adams from Illinois impressed me with his ability to dent people, move with fluidity you’d find in tackles and improve over the course of the week – his ability to pick up communication with his partners on the offensive line and recover against high-level athletes on defense was remarkable to me. I had no idea if he was considered a second-rounder or a sixth-rounder.

From the three practices I saw, he seemed like a potential third-round prospect. Scouts, Inc. at ESPN has him ranked 136, Drafttek has him 145th, PFF places him 160th and Draft Countdown ranks him 194th. I also learned, just from researching him for this piece, that he actually did play tackle at Illinois.

Some places make him the second-ranked offensive player named Isaiah from Illinois.

There is of course some value in fresh eyes – untainted by the narratives of the college season or the success of the teams the prospects were on; Georgia State offensive tackle Travis Glover was a late addition to the Senior Bowl roster as an injury replacement for Jeremy Flax, from Kentucky. I would not have watched any Georgia State offensive film without knowing about Glover and I certainly wouldn’t have taken anything from the ugly-looking, though admittedly effective, offense that helped them go 3-5 in the Sun Belt.

Glover is unranked by PFF, ESPN, Drafttek and Draft Countdown. Having watched the film of Glover and his Senior Bowl reps, I think he’s a Day 2 prospect. He moves as well as any first-round tackle prospect, with the size and physicality requisite of that kind of player.

He didn’t demonstrate any capacity for a true kick-step in college, often shuffling or setting vertically. His pass-blocking carried a tendency to catch rather than initiate contact. This wasn’t a lack of physicality – he’s an incredibly physical player and a phenomenal finisher – but a technique issue. While I’m not confident that he resolved the kick-step concern, he did set much more aggressively at the Senior Bowl, to tremendous success.

That feels like an advantage fresh eyes offered me over someone with a great command of the class.

But it’s primarily a negative. I had no idea that Roman Wilson was outplaying his draft slot or that Jordan Morgan was underplaying his status as a fringe first-rounder. That’s an important part of the narrative and great context to watching these reps.

Quinyon Mitchell, a corner from Toledo, played in a primarily zone-coverage system. He was dominant in man coverage here at the Senior Bowl. That’s not context I had without a throwaway comment from a draft analyst I caught while walking around.

In total, I don’t offer a lot of value to people hoping to learn about the draft prospects in Mobile. I don’t have a company paying for my flight, accommodations or meals.

So, what the fuck am I doing at the Senior Bowl?

For years, the Senior Bowl has been a networking event for NFL media. There was value in watching the prospects, but there was more value in the fact that every team would be in attendance – which meant media from all over the country gathered in one spot, a rare occurrence.

There’s value in that – not just in reconnecting with friends, but in building new connections, finding new jobs, developing new sources and getting the lay of the land.

On top of that, the ability to talk to team personnel across the league meant new angles to stories, breaking new ground on team dynamics and getting first-person feedback on what teams have been thinking.

It’s also fairly well known that the Senior Bowl, as a meeting location, is fading. That’s no knock on the event but a product of the realities of the modern media environment. More media entities have shut down travel for their reporters while teams have tightened the leash on their personnel – no longer will media members cull information by offering a drink to a wayward team scout.

That doesn’t mean there aren’t sourced stories – there are – but rather that the majority of them come from others in the league speculating on a team situation rather than the team itself.

Either way, that hasn’t been how I’ve gone about writing. I don’t tend to develop sources, break news or rely on team scouting evaluations.

For a good chunk of practice, I’ll be sitting in the stands next to other evaluators I trust with my binoculars aimed at the field, watching one-on-ones. But for most of practice, I’m wandering around trying to find people I know and chatting with them before moving on to the next group of media members.

I’m going to better remember going to a restaurant called BJ’s for steak and a pizookie and staying after close for hours chatting with the server than I am the movement skills of Oregon State tackle Taliese Fuaga or the casual losses piled up by Penn State cornerback Kalen King.

I spent hours watching film of a college guard who was not invited to the Senior Bowl simply because the offense was ridiculous and he couldn’t execute it. This didn’t add any insight into the Senior Bowl or give me a deeper understanding of the sport I cover.

The drive to Mobile, Alabama from Destin-Fort Walton in Florida is beautiful up until the moment you cross the border from the panhandle into Alabama. For whatever reason, Florida is more invested in visitors seeing the green implied by the “emerald coast” and giving drivers a view of the ocean than Alabama is.

Neither seem particularly concerned with enforcing speed limits, as officers from both states idled in police vehicles as cars whizzed by the 65-mile-per-hour highway at 90 miles per hour. The drive, initially meant to pick up other media members along the way until a flight delay derailed plans, allowed me two moments of reflection –  the first one a midnight drive inviting in my most terrifying monsters on the way to Mobile.

I was worried and anxious about what I was doing, what I would write and whether it made sense to fly across the country for a vanity trip. I’m still reeling from having lost my way as a full-time football journalist and I didn’t know if I could afford a trip like this for a blog – I already know what my tax bill looks like and January is the leanest month for most independent content creators.

On top of that, I had recently come out of a long-term relationship and am in the middle of the process of selling my house. These past few months have been characterized more by transition than stability. Fucking off to Alabama seemed to be the least useful thing to do amidst this uncertainty.

The drive back, this time in disinfecting sunlight, I realized that not every work trip is about doing work. Sometimes it’s reminding myself why I do it.