Tom E. Curran • E-mail

INDIANAPOLIS - “Be prepared.” It’s the Boy Scout motto all the time. It’s the NFL scouts’ motto right now.

When the head of the football-watching world swivels in the direction of incoming NFL talent, the work done by the league’s 32 scouting departments comes into view. And while fans might be just starting to place faces next to names like Joe Flacco, Leodis McKelvin and Jeff Otah, scouts know what kind of toothpaste these kids use.

And while the immediate focus is on the 2008 draft class, scouts are already conversant in the 2009 group.

But after all the preparation is done and all the information is evaluated, which NFL scouting departments do the best job year after year in stocking their roster?

Talking to scouts, coaches and general managers at the NFL Scouting Combine, the same franchises came up over and over.

The Indianapolis Colts, New England Patriots, San Diego Chargers, Baltimore Ravens, New York Giants, Pittsburgh Steelers and Green Bay Packers.

“Look at the people who have good records,” said Colts president Bill Polian, probably the most consistently successful GM of the past two decades. “One flows from the other.”

How does a decision-maker like Polian know if his scouting department is doing its job?

“It isn’t just who you draft, it’s what your reports say,” he explained. “That, and how your board’s constructed. Sometimes who you draft is a function of luck. How that player performs is a function of luck. Injuries or off-field issues (can arise). What I want to make sure of every year — and what our scouting people are charged with doing — is determining whether or not we’re getting the right information and putting the right grade on a player. It’s the input on the baseline level that’s critically important.”

After months of scouting, players are given an overall grade. Those generally run from 1.0 (extreme longshot to make any team) to 9.0 (possible franchise player). Most first-rounders come in between 6.0 and 7.0.

Teams won’t stack every draft-eligible player. Once a team gets to the point where its ranking players that couldn’t make their team at that position, they stop grading.

Then comes the vertical stack at a given position.

As Patriots coach Bill Belichick explained in a Providence Journal piece on draft preparation a few years back, “As you vertically stack, it's just, 'The first is better than the second, the second's better than the third.'"

After the vertical stack comes the more difficult horizontal stack in which players with the same grades are stacked. That’s when scouting, personnel and coaches decide whether a linebacker with a 6.0 grade is better than a tight end with a 6.0.

"This part is hard," Belichick said. "Here you start talking about a corner on the rise versus a center who's a good player, but not a good athlete. At some point you have to break up that clump and say, 'OK, this is one, this is two, this is three.' Even if you have 15 guys in the 6.0 range and another 15 in the 6.1, you have to determine, 'This guy over that guy, that guy over the next guy,' and now you're in another vertical stack within your horizontal stack."

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