New Orleans Saints Forums - blackandgold.com - NOLA.com Anatomy of a draft pick: A detailed look at how the New Orleans Saints scouted safety Kenny Vaccaro

New Orleans Saints college scouting director Rick Reiprish quickly got the feeling that he was looking at a "special kind of player" when he got his first in-depth look at Texas safety Kenny Vaccaro late last September. After seven more months of exhaustive research on Vaccaro and hundreds of other draft prospects, that opinion hasn't changed.

Reiprish's visit to the University of Texas that day was just like many others that he makes across the country during college football season. He watched tape of Vaccaro and other Texas draft prospects, watched a Longhorns practice and sought opinions from head coach Mack Brown on down to the strength coach.

"He stood out, because you saw him do a lot of different things," Reiprish said when he recently sat down with pro scouting director Ryan Pace to offer a detailed look at the Saints' scouting process. "I think in my report my statement was, 'He's one of the easier safeties to evaluate because you saw him do everything.' Cover, run and tackle players and everything else.

"Looking at the film, he stood out as being an outstanding player. Then you watch him on the practice field and kind of get the feeling that you were seeing a special kind of player at that position."

Reiprish filed the Saints' first official scouting report on Vaccaro after that late-September visit. But it was hardly the last.

Southwest area scout Mike Baugh visited Texas the next week and filed his own report. Then in October, South regional scout Josh Lucas went in "over the top" for yet another opinion on Vaccaro.

Baugh and Reiprish each went back and attended a Texas game. Then the Saints' coaches and general manager Mickey Loomis got involved during the NFL scouting combine, Texas' pro day and Vaccaro's pre-draft visit to the team's practice facility.

Along the way, several little things stood out about Vaccaro - from the way his serious "demeanor" toward football impressed everyone in meetings to the fact that Vaccaro was disciplined enough to sneak in a morning workout at the hotel during his New Orleans visit.

By the time the Saints actually drafted Vaccaro with the 15th overall pick in last month's NFL draft, they had official reports from seven different sources in their file on him - from Reiprish, Baugh and Lucas, from the National Football Scouting service that the Saints and 20 other NFL teams use, from secondary coach Wesley McGriff, from assistant secondary coach Andre Curtis and from defensive coordinator Rob Ryan - plus the opinions of Loomis and Payton, among others.

"So by the end of the day you get a lot of opinions on the top prospects," said Pace, pointing out that some prospects might have 10 or more reports.

For example, Pace himself was assigned to study all of the top offensive tackle prospects in this year's draft after he was done with the bulk of his work on all of the NFL free agents. So Pace wrote a report on Saints third-round draft choice Terron Armstead, one of six official reports in Armstead's file.

In the end, guys like Vaccaro, Armstead and hundreds of others were assigned a "Saints final grade" somewhere between 1.0 and 9.0.

And Vaccaro wound up being the highest-rated player available when the Saints were on the clock in Round 1 - seven months after Reiprish filed that first report.

"There's a lot of people who liked this guy. A lot of people," Reiprish said when asked if there was ever an individual scout or coach along the way who really campaigned for Vaccaro more than others. "Because there was an easy like when you watched the kid play."

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