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A new-age relic: advance scouts have been around forever, but their roles—and the men who fill them—have changed. Meet Rodd Newhouse, who walks a lonely road in a weekly attempt to give the Cardinals an edge

Sporting News, The, Sept 27, 2004 by Paul Attner

Michael Vick is running left. A Rams tackler closes. Vick lakes, the tackler grabs nothing. Vick senses the end zone, tries to leapfrog another defender, gets nudged at the top of his jump and explodes to the ground, hack first. Fans in the Georgia Dome are high-riving, screaming, dancing, singing. Amid the tumult, Rodd Newhouse sits in the open press box, head down, staring at a computer, stone-faced, maybe the only one in the place oblivious to Vick's magnetism.

"I've got a lonely job," he says later.

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It's also one of the most unusual--and endangered--jobs in the NFL. Newhouse is an advance scout for the Cardinals; he spends game days every season in the stadium of his team's next opponent. In a sport methodically being overrun by all kinds of technological advances, Newhouse and his peers are a link to the past, when the human element--not just digital "cutups" and computer printouts--was considered crucial to a franchise's game-planning.

Yet Newhouse is not yesterday's scout. At 29, he truly represents Generation X, with his laptop, digital recorder, cell phone and ongoing romance with the web. Once the province of grizzled veterans with coaching backgrounds who delighted in stealing sideline signals of upcoming foes, the world of advance scouting is becoming a young man's trade, a training ground for guys who aspire to be personnel chiefs, general managers or more. Newhouse, the son of former Cowboys fullback Robert Newhouse, grew up in a football atmosphere, for sure. He also recently earned his real estate broker's license, and this past summer he attended an NFL-sponsored executive education program run by the Stanford School of Business. He already has been with the Cardinals five years; he has no desire to be a lifetime scout.

Newhouse attends the Falcons-Rams game not to uncover any incredibly revealing piece of information. Rather, he's there because his coach, Dennis Green, wants to know more about the Falcons, who will host the Cardinals this Sunday, than he might learn by just reading the voluminous printouts he'll receive on Atlanta.

"His report is part of the puzzle," says Green. "You don't want something to happen in our game that we should have known but didn't because we didn't send an advance scout the week before. There just is stuff you can pick up live, I think, that you can't get otherwise."

So Newhouse spends 20 weekends throughout late summer and fall sitting in stadiums usually thousands of miles from where the Cardinals are playing, hardly knowing anyone in the building, trying to be the human element that might help increase the comfort level of his coach. Sure, he could tell Green that, hey, you better contain Vick. But that's hardly justification for this trip. Instead, the Arizona coaches found sitting on their desks last Monday a report telling them, among other tidbits: how much time was left on the play clock when the Falcons' offense broke every huddle and how much was left at each snap; the personnel groupings for every one of 11 offensive formations, plus a judgment on how smoothly Atlanta handled substitutions; which assistants helped relay signs to the field for the offense and defense and the tempo of the calls; every Falcons player who spent injury time on the sideline; the personnel on all of the various special teams groupings, and a flow chart with details of every offensive drive, including which personnel groupings were utilized on specific downs.

Newhouse enters most of the live information into his computer as the game progresses, using forms he has developed. When he can't type fast enough, he talks into his digital recorder. Some of this information he transcribes during game breaks; the rest he transfers on the plane ride home that night. He also adds observations: How were the crowd and the home team affected by the highs and lows of the game? Were there any sideline behavioral problems? Was there anything unusual that wouldn't be seen on tape? He starts with a quick, objective summary, perhaps 400 words long. His goal is to have the report finished by the time he lands, so it is ready when his coaches begin work on the Falcons game plan.

Green also wants Newhouse to give him biographical information on each Atlanta player. Maybe one of them was a high school quarterback. And just maybe he might touch the ball on a reverse. If he does, Green wants his defense ready for a fake reverse and pass. Maybe some coach will glean from all the compilations something to give the Cardinals an edge against Atlanta. That's what this is all about, looking for an edge.

Yet Newhouse, even after all these years, wonders if any of his hard work will make a difference in the outcome of next week's game. It's a question that has haunted advance scouts forever, but particularly since information on opponents is now so readily available. Once, films of the opponent's last game might not be broken down until midweek; the report of the advance scout was the coaches' lone early, up-to-date, factual synopsis of that foe. But now, tapes are exchanged the day after games and spliced within hours. The Broncos, for example, see no reason for having an advance scout.

A new-age relic: advance scouts have been around forever, but their roles—and the men who fill them—have changed. Meet Rodd Newhouse, who walks a lonely road in a weekly attempt to give the Cardinals an edge

Sporting News, The, Sept 27, 2004 by Paul Attner

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