College football coaches want as many of their players as possible in the NFL. NFL scouts want as accurate information as can possibly be attained. Everyone agrees on these two points.
That's about where the agreements end. As detailed by Tom Pelissero of USA Today, attitudes toward allowing scouts on campus varies wildly throughout college football.
According to Pelissero, the standard around college football is to open the facility for one to two days a week, allowing scouts to view a portion of practice and watch film in a designated scouts' room. [Note that this isn't what FootballScoop hears from Scouts, particularly with regards to access to programs in the Southeastern part of the country.] Paranoia often runs high, as coaches worry scouts may be sharing information with agents or the media or that scouts' presence will be an undue distraction for players.
“Most of the schools do a good job of setting their restrictions, communicating why, and they’re fairly reasonable,” National Football Scouting president Jeff Foster told USA Today. “But sometimes we will get schools that will surprise us and they’ll have restrictions across the board for the entire fall. That does make it hard.
“And generally, those are the schools that down the line somewhere complain to us: ‘He didn’t get invited to the combine’ and ‘you’ve got his speed estimated at this’ or ‘this information is incorrect. Well, if we don’t have access to go in and get that information, then we have to make our own assumptions based off of what we see on film.”
Pelissero notes that Jim Harbaugh closed all of August practice and had announced that the first three weeks of the season would be open to scouts; but then promptly shut that down during week two.
Then, on the other end of the spectrum, is Alabama. Nick Saban is actually the most liberal coach in college football when it comes to allowing scouts on campus: making tape available starting at 8 a.m. every day and opening every single practice to scouts. “We feed them lunch and everything,” Saban said. “We treat ‘em good.
“Rather than going the other way – saying ‘I’m going to try to hide them all so you can’t see them’ – I would rather be able to give the guy good information.”
In the end, scouts say, when faced with two equal players of the same position, one of which the team has a notebook full of accurate information and the other not, general managers will take the former every time. “It doesn’t hurt us,” a scout said, "it hurts the kid."