Hampton High, NSU alum helped build Bucs into a title contender
In between classwork and playing college football, Donovan Cotton found time during his final year at Norfolk State in 2010 to read Pete Williams’ book, “The Draft: A Year Inside the NFL’s Search for Talent.”
Cotton knew after finishing the 305-page look at hopefuls playing through the 2004 season in preparation for the 2005 NFL draft that he wanted to be a professional football scout. He just didn’t have any idea how to go about it.
So, although he was a running back, he essentially threw up a Hail Mary — or to be more accurate, dozens and dozens of them. With the help of the late Kirk Mastromatteo, then the Spartans’ offensive coordinator and running backs coach, he wrote to every NFL team asking for a chance.
He didn’t hear back right away, so he kept writing for years until, in 2012, the Green Bay Packers offered him an internship. That led to an internship with the Seattle Seahawks and eventually a job in 2014 as an assistant scout with the Tampa Bay Buccaneers.
The Buccaneers were so impressed that they offered Cotton a full-time job, and he is their collegiate scout in a seven-state area of the Southwest that includes Texas, Louisiana and Oklahoma. Now in his sixth year as a full-time scout, Cotton will be in Raymond James Stadium tonight to watch his employer host the Kansas City Chiefs in Super Bowl LV.
“Getting to see my team play in this game is so exciting because to go from the No. 1 pick in the NFL draft in 2015 to the Super Bowl means we have overcome a lot of adversity to be here,” Cotton said. “To share in a success like this with those same people is the best feeling.”
Cotton’s biggest success on the field came taking handoffs from current NFL quarterback Tyrod Taylor on Hampton High’s Group
AAA Division 5 state championship team.
“Donovan was a tough kid and a smart kid,” Hampton coach Mike Smith said. “He worked hard.”
The commitment Cotton showed, he learned from Smith.
“Mike Smith taught us detail and that every single day you come to work,” Cotton said.
That work ethic landed him a spot on the NSU team as a walk-on. He was never a star, but he finished third on the team with 281 yards rushing as a junior and caught 24 passes out of the backfield as a senior for 266 yards and two TDs.
During his scouting internship with Green Bay, Cotton says he learned from Reggie McKenzie and John Dorsey, both future NFL general managers, about precision in writing scouting reports. Unless he could paint a concise word picture about what, for example, average or below-average quickness meant, they would hand his report back filled with corrections in red ink.
But Cotton quickly
learned to communicate a player’s physical skills, while also learning to evaluate him mentally. Cotton said you must know how a player thinks, how he learns his habits and what he’s like on the field and off.
That involves lots of game film, but when Cotton visits collegiate practices, he’ll talk to anyone he can to learn about a player: trainer, assistant coach, academic adviser — you name it. Of course, he talks to the head coaches, too, and on his weekly route he might find himself shaking hands and chatting briefly with LSU’s Ed Orgeron one day, Oklahoma’s Lincoln Riley the next and Texas A&M’s Jimbo Fisher the day after that.
One of the Bucs’ biggest draft successes of late is from LSU, linebacker Devin White, who leads the team in tackles. Cotton won’t take too much credit for that, admitting that the joke among scouts is that any one of them would spot a talent like White.
But he mines each of the small colleges in his sevenstate territory and occasionally finds the unexpected gem. Cotton spotted backup tight end Tanner Hudson — who’s from Division II
Southern Arkansas — at an obscure all-star game.
That’s the kind of work Cotton and the Bucs’ 15-man scouting staff – eight of them focusing on college players – is doing. While things wind down for the Bucs’ players after tonight, Cotton will be at his busiest the next couple of months during the lead-up to the NFL draft in late April.
Because of COVID-19, he’ll travel far less this year in the search for new Buccaneers, doing most of his interviews via Zoom and most of his evaluations by computer. That’s not a bad thing, because it affords him more time at home with 15-monthold daughter Sienna.
She might surprise him with a new word or a new song when he makes the short trek home from the Super Bowl on Sunday. Then it will be right back to work evaluating college players, the job he’s dreamed of doing since reading that book about it more than a decade ago.
“My father, in particular ways, always highlighted the importance of reading,” Cotton said. “For a book to be the spark that got all of this started, I bet it would make him smile.”