Football Scouting Methods

Let me start off with a bit of a strange statement considering how this project usually goes: the book “Football Scouting Methods” isn’t going to be a part of our football canon, and if you gave this one a pass based on what I say about it, I would totally understand.

And yet, I haven’t stopped thinking about it since I read it.

The first thing that catches your name about Football Scouting Methods is the name on the spine. Right above the title, the author’s last name, Belichick, is emblazoned in small capital letters. But this isn’t Bill Belichick’s work. It belongs to that of his dad, Steve. Or, if you believe David Halberstam’s assertion in “The Education of a Coach,” which we’ll take a look at next month, it was actually written by Bill’s mom, Jeannette, who took on the thankless task of condensing a career of football knowledge into something actually readable.

And if you know anything about how football coaches operate, that’s no small feat. A lot of coaches don’t have good methods of communicating the things that they know, and fewer still have a refined system they can actually pass along to others. Steve Belichick only struggled with one of those things, because his system for scouting opposing teams, his football scouting methods, if you will, is what makes up the backbone of this book.

The elder Belichick coached for nearly 50 years, spending the bulk of that time at Navy. His scouting reports were considered by many to be the work of a master, and his abilities as a football evaluator laid the foundation for his son’s eventual success.

“Football Scouting Methods” shows, in immense and overwhelming detail, what actually goes into scouting a football team. Belichick walks you through his extremely granular process of preparing to watch an opposing football team, not on tape, but live and in person. And believe me when I say it is granular.

Belichick has well-defined rules and procedures for where you sit, what pencils you should use, and what you should be watching and when. The last two points are the easiest, though: according to Belichick, you should be watching everything all of the time. It’s that simple.

Simple, of course, but not easy. How do you possibly take in everything a team is doing on a given play in a way that allows you to retain the information and actually use it later? We’ll get to the actual system in a second, but the big takeaway here is that it’s imperative that you do take everything in. For Belichick, both the elder and the younger, there are no wasted plays in football. Everything is something to be leveraged. Any play could reveal important information. Any formation could be the key to victory or defeat.

How do you capture that? With systems. “Football Scouting Methods” details intense systems for charting plays, giving the scout a method to communicate precise information about formation, personnel, and what happens on a given play with a series of letters and numbers arranged in a kind of football shorthand, which Belichick designed himself to be able to unravel later as he prepared his reports.

The problem is this: most of the processes in this book are dated to the point of being unusable, and they’re designed to scout a version of the game that doesn’t exist anymore.

Consider that when Belichick was getting his feet under him, Navy was actually a contender on the national championship scene in college sports. They were ranked in the top 10 five different times between 1956 and 1965, and peaked at 11 and 17 in 1978 and 1979. They went to six significant bowl games while Belichick was there, and his scouting reports were a big reason why.

But the game he was scouting was very different. Belichick encourages his readers to make sure they have access to the latest and best information on all modern offensive systems, such as the Wing T and Single Wing, and his default scouting diagrams assume the T formation will be the standard for most backfields. There will be exceptions, but I’d wager most football fans today have probably never seen a true T formation in an actual football game, and certainly not in an NFL game. He also cautions against putting too much stock in evaluating an opponents’ passing game, since the quarterback can fool you easily by doing something as simple as changing his dropback, deviating from the pure backpedal, which was the standard at the time.

Belichick even went so far as to warn against using any kind of video in his scouting process. 

“The question arises in many minds, why scout when movies are available? This seems a logical question, and in fact sometimes the use of movies does cut down on the amount of scouting done. Not all game movies are taken with the same skill, however, or for that matter with the same equipment, and oftentimes the pictures do not show as much as many head coaches would like to see. The wide-scope lens has come into fairly wide use among the major colleges in the nation, but for the smaller schools the equipment used to take this type of picture in many instances is too expensive. Many movies used by colleges today do not, for example, show the defensive backfield men, yet most coaches will agree that a mistake by one backfield man will result in a touchdown or long gain more often than a mistake made by any other player on the team.”

It’s that kind of dating that makes the book essentially useless as a modern guide to football scouting. Nobody’s going to attend games in person to get the best view on the opponent’s Wing T offense outside of a few high school coaches, and using video to scout is a given in 2026, much less advanced stats or anything of that nature.

Why bother with this book then? First, it’s a good reminder of the importance of having a method to your madness when trying to get a handle on watching football seriously. You need a system. Even a bad system is better than no system. If you take time to actually think about how you’re watching football rather than just following the ball, you’re already way ahead of the game.

Second, this is one of the most accessible ways to access a high-level system for scouting. Nobody’s going to give this kind of information away for essentially free in 2026; any scout doing this kind of project today would charge you for their course or masterclass or video series, and it’d be a lot less digestible than even Belichick’s book is today. If you want a look at what a high-end football mind is actually doing when he puts pen to paper and evaluates an opposing team, this is it.

“Football Scouting Methods” absolutely does not belong in our football canon. It’s not a foundational text for the sport, and you could easily go your entire football life without knowing what’s inside of it and not miss a beat. But if you want to get a taste of what the experts are really doing when they’re scouting their opponents, this is worth a peek, and anybody who really knows football will be impressed if they see it sitting on your bookshelf.

Maybe that’s worth something to you. Or maybe you just want something a little more modern than “The Art of War” to impress the strategy nerds in your life. Either way, “Football Scouting Methods” is a book solely for the obsessives of the football world. I’m glad it exists, even if it’s not something most people need to bother with reading.

Next month, we’re going to take a look at some of the fruits of Steve Belichick’s football scouting methods as they were borne in the career of his son, Bill. David Halberstam, one of the great sportswriters of all time, takes us on a tour of the early portions of Belichick’s Patriots career in “The Education of a Coach.” That’s next month on the Blue 58 Book Club.

Notable quotes

• Every effort should be made to stop what the opponent does best. If you are unsuccessful in accomplishing this, it can generally be attributed to two things: first, that adequate preparation was not made, or second, that proper preparation was made, bu the opponent had better personnel and you were unable to cope with them. If they had the advantage in personnel, there is little else that could have been done. It is logical to think that a coach’s philosophy should be: “Be strong against a team’s strength. Be alert for anything they have shown. If they do beat you, make them do it with something that they haven’t shown before.”

• The laymen seem to believe that much of what a football scout does is carried on in the utmost secrecy. Only scouting that is illegal is done in secrecy. Many football coaches who have done no scouting seem to believe that all scouts work in the same manner and seek the same information. Actually, it is unlikely there are any two scouts who work in exactly the same manner, with the same equipment, and seek the same information.

• There are many [coaches] who do not analyze the scouting report on the kicking game with the same thoroughness with which they approach the analysis of the offense and defense.