College scouting director Cole Spencer has prepared for this moment his entire life

“I’d be a little kid, ripping and running around the facility, and just to calm down, I’d sit in the office with him and watch tape,” Spencer said with a laugh. “Watching practice tape or the next opponent, those are the kind of memories I have. That was fun. It’s what I enjoy about the job I have now. Watching the tape is the best part of my job.”

Spencer joked that his path in football might have been slowed by “my lack of athletic ability,” but he was quick to adapt to the scouting mindset as opposed to coaching the way his father did.

“I knew I didn’t want to be a coach,” Spencer said. “The tape-watching, the evaluation, figuring out what makes these guys tick and how to build a successful team, that drew me to it. The team-building aspect of it.

“Dad and I would watch the tape, and I thought it was fun to evaluate the players and poke fun of him, ‘Oh why do you like this guy?’ That part was more interesting to me than the actual teaching aspect of it.”

Of course, his own path to the NFL was not a linear one. He was an economics major at Northern Illinois, and worked with a trading firm in Chicago after graduation in 2007, before getting his start in football on the operations side at Eastern Illinois.

“I kind of bounced back and forth,” he said. “Going through school I was an econ major, so I kind of thought I wanted to do the business thing for a little bit. I worked at a trading firm, and thought I wanted to do that. But being around football my whole life, it’s what comes easy to you; it comes naturally. It’s what I enjoy. So it was a natural transition to stay in football.”

He got a job with Washington in 2010, and quickly rose through the scouting ranks, first as an in-house pro assistant, before getting the Northeast area scout job in 2012. He was quickly promoted to the Midwest and Southeast (the land mass and number of players increasing each with each job) before he was named national scout in 2019.

He may not be making as many stops on the road as he once did, but he’s still putting a lot of miles in, usually making one trip to the larger schools to cross-check the department’s work. So while an area scout has to cover every school in his territory, no matter how many prospects might be there, Spencer has to focus on the 30,000-foot view to make sure everything’s covered as thoroughly as it needs to be.

“The biggest thing is time management as you gain responsibility,” he said of his job. “The workload’s different doing national stuff. The drives get longer. You’re skipping over some smaller schools. When you’re an area scout, you can go from Alabama-Birmingham to the University of Alabama. Now you have to skip UAB and go all the way to Auburn. As an area guy, you may have a break with a school with five to eight prospects. As a national guy and director, we went to some schools that gave you 30 prospects this year, with the COVID year and a huge class of guys. That’s a big transition.

“It’s been new. Learning on the job, obviously. But you just try to stay organized.”

This year, that’s more important than ever.