Scouting for Success: What Freight Procurement Can Learn from the NFL Draft

The Sports World can’t get enough of the NFL draft.?

More than 125,000 fans turned out in person in Kansas City last Thursday, home to the Super Bowl Champion Kansas City Chiefs, and another 34 million watched for four hours on ESPN and NFL Network – twice as big an audience that watches football every Sunday!

“And with the first pick in the 2023 NFL Draft, the Carolina Panthers select …”

Millions of football fans hang on every word, waiting breathlessly for Commissioner Roger Goodell to complete that sentence.

The Detroit Lions: A Case Study in Futility

For many NFL fans, especially diehard Lions supporters like myself, hope springs eternal around Draft season. It provides an opportunity to augment your roster and potentially change your team’s fortunes in short order. Many Lions fans view it as our Super Bowl, mostly because we are the saddest, most inept franchise in all of sports.? We have only won one playoff game since 1957! Which means we’ve never been to the Super Bowl. And, sadly, we are the only franchise among the 32 NFL teams who can claim both non-achievements.

But the 2023 season will be our year, and I truly believe that. How can it not with two first round picks, strong ‘21 & ‘22 Drafts and a stacked roster from free agency? I guess that's why we are called ‘fan’atics.?

My Journey from Sports Management to Freight Procurement

The Detroit Lions' historic futility led my adolescent self to believe I could draft and assemble a roster better than Matt Millen (Lions’ GM 2001-2008). My dad and I bought all of the draft magazines available, “scouted” our favorite prospects, and devoted the entire weekend to watching The Draft while grading pick after pick.?

This obsession with roster creation within the confines of a draft, free agency, and a salary cap followed me into my college years, where I graduated with a degree in Sport Management. I had the opportunity to intern for three professional sports teams throughout my college career. But unfortunately post graduation, the entry-level compensation for a job with a team and my personal financial runway did not align.?

Fast forward five years later, after a stint in freight brokerage, I found myself in transportation procurement at one of the largest truckload shippers in the US. I was responsible for running our bid event and sourcing new carriers for our ever-evolving freight network. One of my mentors and former bosses at the time, Paul Estrada, equated building a freight routing guide to building a professional sports team roster. The procurement team must assess the risk of their providers and put them in the best position to succeed to extract the maximum value for the dollar amount paid. Think of every play as a shipment, every player as a carrier, and every RFP Award as a season.?

Our company culture expected every department to be maniacal about data. We dissected every lane, carrier, volume forecast, facility performance, and customer to project our pricing and service risks. In turn, we strived to provide as many data points to our RFP participants as possible so they could properly assess their risk and accurately price our business. Every penny spent on transportation procurement impacted our bottom line.

The Future of Freight Procurement: Bringing Standardization to Performance Evaluation

There are certainly parallels that can be drawn between scouting college football players and scouting trucking companies. However,? NFL scouts have far more market-level performance data on their player pool at their disposal than a Transportation Procurement professional. They even have a standard set of performance metrics they can use to compare every player entering the league. Significant resources and investments are put into the NFL Draft process: the NFL Combine, college pro days, in-person interviews, and college film & statistics analysis, to name a few.?

Furthermore, there are millions of dollars poured into each team’s player personnel department, with the average team employing anywhere between 6-20 scouts. They have to get their roster right; NFL teams are multi-billion dollar organizations with player payrolls over $200 million. Failure means unemployment (unless you are Matt Millen).?

In the domestic truckload ecosystem, where there are over 100k FTL trucking companies and 18k brokerages, there is no neutral 3rd party repository for transportation performance. There are no standard KPIs or benchmarks by which we can evaluate carrier performance normalized across the board. Whether you are a shipper or a broker, when evaluating a new provider, one might use tools such as FMCSA data, carrier safety & onboarding tools, and self-reported performance data. Those tools will provide great data on the carrier’s legal risk as a vendor. But, none of them can project a carrier’s performance from a routing guide compliance and SLA perspective.?

In my previous role, we had a freight spend that dwarfed any NFL team’s payroll, but we only had two “scouts”, myself, and an analyst. No matter how much due diligence was done by interviewing potential carriers, asking for references, and reviewing their legal and insurance compliance, every new carrier was truly an unknown risk. The current state of freight procurement is akin to an NFL personnel department heading into the draft war room with no film, no combine, and self-reported college statistics from each prospect. There has got to be a better way. ISO is here to solve that gap.?

If you are a shipper or broker, are maniacal about your data, and want to take a “moneyball” approach to your freight procurement, please reach out to me or my team here at ISO. We aim to democratize logistics performance data so that shippers and brokers can make data-driven procurement decisions based on the total cost of procurement, not paper rates. Strive to be more of a Brett Veach (current Chiefs GM) and less of a Matt Millen.