ScoutsNotebook was co-founded by Matt Alkire and Tommy Lawlor in 2005.
Tommy has been following the Draft for over 20 years. He’s been studying tape and taking notes on players for over a decade now. Tommy was trained by an NFL scout in the art of scouting and player evaluation. He’s learned the game from watching football for thirty years, reading numerous books, and picking the brains of various college and high school coaching staffs. He’s broadcast basketball and football games, as well as smaller sports, for WASU-FM, WCHL-AM, and WDAI-FM. He also co-hosted a daily sports talk show for WDAI in Myrtle Beach, SC. While in college, he was an Intern for WBTV in Charlotte, NC and helped cover professional and college sports. He kept the bench very warm for one year of HS football.
Tommy is a long-suffering Eagles fan and writes a weekly column for PhiladelphiaEagles.com. He runs an Eagles blog called IgglesBlitz, where you can read his up to the minute nonsense brilliance. He writes a weekly column for SB Nation Philly. He also occasionally contributes football articles to the Huffington Post.
Feel free to contact Tommy with football questions, ad inquiries, or if you are interested in media appearances. He can be reached at scoutsnotebook@gmail.com.
You can follow Tommy on Twitter. http://twitter.com/#!/lawlornfl
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Matt has been following the draft as an analyst for several years and came on board to form Scout’s Notebook with Tommy in 2005. He has picked up the art of scouting through high school coaches, college coaches, NFL personnel and Tommy, who got him hooked a while back. Matt worked for Fox Sports in college recruiting for five years and also did consulting work and writing for Junior Rank Sports and the Semper Fidelis Marine Corps All-Star Game. He has been featured on ESPN radio several times for both NFL and college football and has appeared in many newspapers including the Philadelphia Inquirer, Washington Post, Baltimore Sun, Pittsburgh Post Gazette and Chicago Sun-Times. Matt was a tight end and defensive end in high school, played basketball and also ran track. His current positions are as the College Director of Operations for the Maxwell Football Club where he also sits on the Pennsylvania High School Committee.
You can follow Matt on Twitter. @MattAlkire
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So why the heck should you bother reading ScoutsNotebook? This site is based on tape study. If you want a new mock draft to look at every week, there are tons of places to go find them. If you want notes on a player from the Lehigh/Drake game, you’ve come to the right place.
The lifeblood of NFL teams is the draft. The lifeblood of scouting is tape study. Other aspects of scouting are absolutely important, but you study the tape to find out who can play and who can’t. The eye in the sky doesn’t lie, as they say.
We do mix in mock drafts and try to have some fun with the draft, but the bulk of what we do is sitting in front of a TV screen watching a play over and over to find out what really happened. Bill Belichick began his NFL career by watching game film in a broom closet for the Colts. Ask him and I’ll guarantee you that he was as happy doing that as anything he’s done since. To some that sounds insane, but scouts and coaches know exactly what I’m talking about.
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Donate to the site if you like. The money goes to buy equipment and accessories. Tommy still puts a lot of games on video tape (he’s not too bright). Even DVDs aren’t cheap. Thankfully, chocolate pudding and PBR do remain reasonably priced. Matt keeps listing Dr. Pepper on the ScoutsNotebook grocery list, but we’re not rich enough for luxury items like that.
