We spent last week at the NABC Convention in Indianapolis. We talked to coaches about SelfScout, sat in on sessions, and listened.

The response was encouraging. Once coaches understood what SelfScout does—confidential, anonymous interviews with the people inside your program, synthesized into a report only you see—the concept clicked quickly. A common theme in our conversations was that the higher you climb, the less honest feedback you receive. And in a world of NIL, the transfer portal, and more scrutiny than ever, you can’t afford to be the last person to find out what’s broken inside your own building.

One of the highlights of the week was the keynote, where Craig Robinson interviewed Purdue’s Matt Painter and Notre Dame’s Micah Shrewsberry.

Painter told a story about his mentor, Gene Keady, who had “this unbelievable ability to get after you and tell you you’re okay in the same sentence.” That’s a skill. And it’s the kind of thing a coach either knows they have or doesn’t.

He also talked about evaluation, how he wished he’d been better at evaluating the people around him earlier in his career. Not just talent, but also makeup, character and productivity. “Your product is your people,” he said. If that’s true, then the way your people experience your leadership is the most important data point you’re not collecting.

At one point Painter was talking about players who transfer expecting things to be different somewhere else. He said your strengths are going with you, but your weaknesses are going with you too. He was talking about players. But it applies to coaches just as much. The blind spots you have at one program follow you to the next one. The only difference is whether you know about them.

Shrewsberry talked about humility. Bringing an idea to your head coach, hearing no, and not taking it personally. Writing things down. Growing even when nobody’s asking you to. That’s the mentality SelfScout is built for.

Both coaches talked about loyalty, trust, and treating people the right way regardless of title. Painter said he never saw his mentors “big time anybody.” The people inside your program know whether that’s true about you, even if they’ll never say it to your face.

That’s the gap SelfScout exists to fill.

Zak Keefer wrote a well-reported piece in The Athletic this week on Jon Gruden’s second stint (2018-2021) with the Raiders, and it tells the story of an organization with every resource imaginable coming apart from the inside.

Gruden’s coaches and scouts were keeping two completely separate draft boards. They worked on opposite sides of the facility and never reconciled their rankings. A former staffer told Keefer he’d worked for six other head coaches and three other GMs and had never heard of such a thing. In short, the building was maintaining two separate versions of reality, and everyone quietly agreed that arriving at a shared one was no longer possible.

Gruden walked through the door with a 10-year, $100 million contract and total authority. His scouts would spend weeks evaluating a prospect. Gruden would have an assistant cut together a reel of the guy’s worst plays, screen it for the room, and that was that. They called them “kill tapes.” The younger scouts learned fast. You stay quiet, you nod, you wait for the mood to shift.

As one former staffer described it to The Athletic:

“Jon was like the wind, man. Every single day you had no idea which way he was going to blow.”

By the end of Gruden’s tenure, everyone in the building knew his Raiders were broken. Keefer describes the then-GM, Mike Mayock, privately acknowledging the dysfunction, telling himself they had to fix it. They didn’t and they couldn’t, because the entire structure of the organization ensured honest information never reached the one person who needed to hear it.

Gruden was still a capable coach and respected play caller. It was everything else that sunk him. He didn’t create an environment where anyone felt safe telling him he was wrong. Every anonymous quote in Keefer’s piece existed as a thought inside someone’s head while they were still working there. They just had no way to say it, no mechanism to deliver it, and no reason to believe it would matter if they did. So they waited. And years later, with nothing left to lose, they told a reporter. That’s how feedback works in many organizations. It doesn’t arrive when it can actually help.

This is the problem we built SelfScout to solve. We conduct confidential, anonymous interviews with the people inside a coach’s program and deliver the findings in a comprehensive report that belongs to the coach and nobody else. The things Gruden’s former staffers are saying now, to a reporter, for public consumption, years after they left? Those are the same things they could have said privately, in a structured conversation, while they were still there and the information could have actually made a difference.

There’s a question every coach should be able to answer: how do the people inside your program actually experience your leadership?

Many coaches don’t know. The nature of the job prevents it. Authority kills candor. The person with the most power in any building is often the last to hear the truth about themselves.

That’s how coaches get fired over culture problems they never saw coming, lose assistants they thought were happy, and watch players leave for reasons that only make sense afterward. The information was always there. It just had no way to travel upward.

Programs often have no real mechanism for closing that gap. That’s what we hope to solve.

SelfScout is a journalist-led coaching feedback service. You help us curate the list of people we talk to—current and former players, assistants, support staff—and we conduct confidential, anonymous interviews with each of them, asking the questions your position will never let you ask. We’re reporters by background. We’ve spent years covering college sports. We know how to listen. Every interview runs 45 to 60 minutes, and we follow the answers wherever they lead.

We build a report that belongs to you and nobody else. Strengths, blind spots, patterns, and the honest, anonymized words of your own people, paired with a quantitative evaluation across 10 leadership dimensions measured against your own self-assessment. Then we sit down with you, just you, and walk through everything.

Your AD doesn’t see it. Nobody sees it unless you decide they should.

We built SelfScout because we have a sincere desire to help coaches become better, more effective leaders. But also, because we kept watching the same story play out. A coach loses his job. In the weeks that follow, a portrait emerges of a program where the warning signs were everywhere and nobody could deliver them to the one person who needed to hear them. In many cases, the information was in the building but had nowhere to go.

That’s where we come in.

We work with you to find it, and we make sure you hear it first.