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Craig Smith - (14th year looking for talent at NFL camps.) And now, as a national scout for the Winnipeg Blue Bombers, I have been assigned nine teams to scout. My trip will take me as far west as Denver and as far east as Spartanburg, SC where the defending-NFC champs, the Carolina Panthers, have their camp. Our team covers all 32 teams – not all teams do – and the result of what many personnel people in the Canadian Football League call ‘The Grind’ will be a database with reports on several hundred players. We talk with the pro personnel people with the NFL clubs we visit to find out who we should look at first. Then it’s time to eyeball our possible prospects on the field in practice and, if the NFL team allows it, in the video room in their offices. We also attend NFL preseason games to see players in the heat of the battle. We take all those notes and then create a report for our database. We marry up what we see on the field with what we see in his testing results and then find out about a player’s character. Every player is given a grade which is outlined in the Bombers’ own scale. Careful consideration of all the information gathered goes into a grade for a player and it means that at the click of a button, we can have loads of information on a particular player. Craig Smith, a native Winnipegger and lifelong Bomber fan who has worked in the CFL with the B.C. Lions, Hamilton Tiger-Cats and Saskatchewan Roughriders, is the club’s new National Scout. He will be filing reports from his visits to NFL camps regularly to bluebombers.com over the next few weeks. 1st Report - from Green Bay "Season tickets for the club have been sold out since 1960, which is astonishing for a city with a metropolitan area of approximately 306,000 people. Lambeau Field, which holds 80,735, is always sold out. It doesn’t matter if it’s cold, raining, windy, or sunny." "Most importantly, we are looking for players that will fit into the Canadian game. The fundamentals that every player learns from a young age are the same, but in our league, an athlete that may not necessarily fit the typical NFL mold can still have success." "As an example; the men in the trenches do not have to be as gargantuan as they are in the NFL. We can recruit undersized running backs, and linebackers in the CFL can also be considered undersized for the NFL. CFL quarterbacks can be six-feet tall or shorter – and you’d like to have a guy that has mobility – but in any league accuracy is critical." "While scouting practice, I watch the third and fourth-team players, and the odd second-stringer." "I have included a Scouting Checklist that we refer to when scouting the offensive and defensive Lines. It is essentially a position-specific list regarding the guys in the trenches." To see this list, and more go to: http://www.bluebombers.com/2016/07/30/letters-from-camp-july-30th/