The folks in charge of scouting for the Chicago Bears have given us a glimpse into their process, and boy, does it say a lot!

“We start by watching a lot of college football,” said a Bears scout. “It’s a pretty neat gig.”

“We also look at a lot of stats,” said another veteran scout. “It used to be hard crunching all the numbers on our calculators and graph paper. But now we use this really great tool called Excel! It’s basically this giant grid and you can type stuff in the boxes. Here, I’ll show you my screen. It’s great.”

“This is the list of Quarterbacks I’ve been working on. Look, you can put their names and then a bunch of stats like height, weight, completions, favorite color, blood type, astrological sign, food allergies, you get the idea! And you can even highlight the little boxes. Look, I’ll make this one blue. Neat, huh? Then we can take all the data and make an awesome pivot table and see the total points or average points of all the quarterbacks. Or we can make a scatter chart of players by blood type. Or a basic pie chart that shows the number of players in each position in the draft. It is life-changing!”

“We get to put all these cool charts together, and then we can print them out,” said another experienced scout. “The new color printers do some awesome work! Then we put all our charts in an interoffice envelope and sent it on over to [General Manager] Ryan [Poles] to review. Easy peasy lemon squeezy!”

“My goal is to someday be a bear scout instead of a cub scout,” said a little kid.