Coachspeak: TCU’s Gonzales on Scott
GREEN BAY, Wis. – To say Vernon Scott was an underrated draft prospect would suggest that he was rated at all following his senior season at TCU.
Well, Scott indeed was rated. Barely. The Athletic’s Dane Brugler, one of the best draft analysts in the country, rated Scott 61st in this year’s safety class. The Green Bay Packers drafted him in the seventh round, making him the 22nd of 24 safeties selected.
What did the Packers see?
The last three games of the season.
When Scott returned from a midseason ankle injury, there was another injury in TCU’s three-safety alignment. Scott moved to fill that hole.
“That other spot is like a nickel corner at the NFL level,” Horned Frogs safeties coach Paul Gonzales said. “We moved him there and got him ready in the span of a week to play against Texas Tech. He had never taken any reps there before that week and he really thrived. When you look at his body of work as far as the season goes, most of his production and big plays came in the tail-end of the year when he made that move. That was a big deal for him to, ‘Hey, we’ve got to plug you in at a spot’ and he did it and he played at a high level. That was a pretty good culmination for him to the four years of work that he put in. I think that’s what a lot of people saw as they went through the tape of him. Early on, he was solid. As he moved to that spot the last three games, all of a sudden it was like, ‘Whoa, who’s this guy making all these plays?’”
