I first met Kevin McCabe at the NFL scouting combine in 2020.

I’d heard about this behind the scenes job that a handful of scouts work at the combine. The “group scouts” are responsible for a position group for the duration of the combine, shepherding them through the busy and stressful week of interviews, workouts and medical testing. They are part therapist, part camp counselor and part teacher for the week. I wanted to get one of these group scouts to talk to me on the record, but I knew it would not be an easy ask. Most scouts wouldn’t want to reveal their roles, and they or their teams would have some kind of paranoid competitive advantage reason for denying my request.

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I’d heard that Kevin had been the group scout leader for the running backs for the past 25 years, so I requested the west coast area scout from the Vikings and was stunned when he (and his boss Rick Spielman) said yes to my request. But as soon as I met him, I quickly understood why he’d wanted to talk.

Kevin smiled the entire interview and happily spent a half hour with me in a hallway at the JW Marriott in Indianapolis, explaining the details of his special job. He first got assigned the combine task as a young scout with the Rams because it was seen as an unenviable rite of passage then. But he enjoyed looking after the players so much that he stayed in the role year after year.

“We get to meet these guys and build relationships, and that’s what this game is all about really,” Kevin said then. “It really is. You can talk about scheme and you can talk about personnel, but ultimately it is a game about people.”

So much of writing about the NFL is encountering people who really do not want to talk to you. And if they do talk to you, many will do their best to say the fewest amount of words possible. Kevin was so different, and he eagerly shared every bit of his knowledge and experience with me to help me learn more about his job at the combine. I made sure to stay in touch with this rare human after that story came out, and he continued to answer my football questions for the next two years.

When Kevin died in September from leukemia at age 59, many of us in this industry lost a helpful teacher, and most importantly, his wife Anne, and children Torin, Katherine and Keenan lost their husband and father. Kevin spent the past 20 years scouting for the Vikings and eight years before that scouting for the Rams. He was an offensive lineman at Princeton, and before his NFL scouting career, he coached at Pomona College.

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Kevin didn’t have a fancy title. He wasn’t a general manager or a head coach, but, “he was influential in our success on the field,” said Spielman, who worked with Kevin as the Vikings’ general manager. “And he did not care about being recognized.”

“I was thoroughly impressed with not only his work ethic and how he organized everything, but his demeanor with people was incredible.” Spielman said. “I knew that Kevin was a very good talent evaluator, but the biggest part of being in the region where he covered is just the resources he had out there and the relationships he built with people.”

The Vikings had Kevin’s family serve as honorary captains for their Week 15 game against Indianapolis, when Minnesota pulled off a 33-point comeback, the biggest in NFL history. “It felt like my dad was pulling some strings behind that,” Torin said. “He saw things were getting out of hand and had to step in.”

I want you to know who Kevin was because he helped me and many others with his cheery personality and an uncommon instinct to mentor. When I sent him my stories to read, he’d always respond with a comment and a compliment about my writing. He didn’t have to take time out of scouting the largest region of the country to do that, but he still did. 

Last spring, I polled NFL scouts for a glossary of unique scouting terminology that I was working on. Most scouts replied with one or two terms, and some didn’t respond at all. Not Kevin. He sent me a 19-sentence text that included 17 different scouting terms, with in-depth descriptions for how each one applied to players and the game. One of those descriptors was JAG, short for Just A Guy, a term that could never be used to describe him. 

Mike Sholiton, the Vikings director of college scouting and one of Kevin’s best friends, said Kevin was the “phone a friend” for him and so many others in the business. Sholiton was still in college and an intern with the Rams in 1998 when he first met Kevin, who was the Rams’ west coast area scout at the time. When he wasn’t on the road, Kevin was in the Rams office in St. Louis, and he took an interest in Sholiton. “He had nothing to gain by befriending me, but he is the type of person who wanted to know what I was about,” Sholiton said. When the Rams couldn’t hire him, Kevin helped Sholiton get his first real job out of college and later, when Kevin was up for a promotion, he recommended that Sholiton replace him as the Vikings’ BLESTO scout. 

Broncos western national scout Sae Woon Jo was coaching football at Occidental College when he first met Kevin through a mutual friend in 2007. Their friendship started with monthly phone calls about football and life and Jo’s career goals until they finally met at the Senior Bowl six years later, when Jo had landed a job with the Falcons as their west coast scout.

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After that, Jo and Kevin started plotting their college training camp visits together. Each August, they’d drive 2,800 miles visiting 25 schools from Las Vegas to Boise to Seattle, and then down the 5 to Eugene and into California. “My first year scouting went way better than anyone could have ever imagined, and it was because of Kevin,” Jo said. “At the time, Oregon was a tough visit, there were only so many people that were willing to talk to scouts and help scouts out. But I was with Kevin, and he would vouch for me at every school we went to, which established my relationship at every school.”

There are dozens of stories of Kevin running into a new west coast scout, or sometimes an old one, while at a restaurant or bar on the road and insisting that they join him at his table. “After he passed away, I would get calls from all these people,” Sholiton said. “Even the old grisled angry-about-people scouts would be like, I was out west, and Kevin was there with somebody else, but he knew I was a scout, and he knew I was by myself, and he said, I’m not going to let you eat alone, come sit with us.”

Torin McCabe, Kevin’s oldest son, says he has heard two or three different permutations of that same story. One of them came from Vikings assistant director of college scouting Pat Roberts, who at one time was new to the area and working for another NFL club. Kevin recognized him at a restaurant in Eugene from the Oregon school visit earlier that day and pulled him over to his table. “(Pat) told me, he could have seen me as a threat,” Torin said. “Someone encroaching on his turf. But my dad pulled him over, and he got to know him, and he helped him. He loved to get to know people.”

Kevin also loved to drink a hoppy IPA (and sometimes brew his own), and he would insist on avoiding chain restaurants on the road. “We’re traveling for a living,’” Jo remembers Kevin often saying. “‘Let’s enjoy each of the unique areas that we get to go to.’”

Jo said Kevin would always ask the server. “Do you have anything local?”

“Cheers fellas,” he’d say to whoever it was that he’d welcomed to his table that evening.

“Just about everybody, their first interaction with him was probably at a pub, cheersing a beer,” Sholiton said. “We still say, ‘Cheers fellas’ all the time.”

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With the Vikings, Kevin was responsible for the largest area in scouting, one that produces many NFL players. He also cross-checked running backs, a position that Minnesota has been strong at for many years, and one that he got a very close look at while leading them through the NFL scouting combine.

Kevin took his job as a combine group scout seriously, and he told me that meant communicating with his players at all hours. He once replied to a text from a hungry player looking for food at 1 a.m. and another at 3 a.m. asking about the wakeup call. Jo said he remembered being with Kevin when a running back from years earlier would call him, asking for advice because they remembered how he had been there for them in the anxious moments at the combine.

“It is important for us to be an advocate for these guys,” Kevin said in 2020. “There are times when we are on the medical day, it is a really long day, they are up at 6 a.m. eating breakfast and they are getting pulled around and taken a million different directions, so by the time they get to the orthopedic surgeon for whatever team, it might be the 28th orthopedic surgeon, he might say this guy needs an MRI, but I’ll say OK, first let’s get him some lunch because it’s 3 p.m. and he hasn’t eaten anything since 6 a.m. These guys need somebody to be able to say no, let’s give him a break, let’s sit down and eat some lunch and then we’ll finish the day.”

Sholiton said Kevin was at his best as a group scout. “These are high-stress situations,” he said. “We go every year to the combine, so we are desensitized to the anxiety, but Kevin, for as long as he did it, always was able to put himself in their shoes. He would take the extra time to explain in tedious detail. This is why we are asking you to do this, people are studying your every move. You never know when you are going to pass by a GM. The void when he is not here is because he did it better than anybody else ever did it in that particular role, because he understood who people were.”

And Sholiton and Jo said that advocacy extended to all the scouting he did. “We as scouts always talk about the things that players can’t do,” Jo said. “What are their shortcomings? Kevin had a unique ability to identify and talk about what the player can do, and what they are not just good at but great at. That is something that I learned from him. Let’s go into these reports and evaluate these players and talk about them to these coaches, and say, what can this guy really do well?”

“I don’t think Kevin was ever looking for a reason to cut anyone down,” Sholiton said. “He was always looking for reasons to make a case for the player. That is something that I carry with me now. The players don’t have — you know, we’re their attorney in the process, we are making a case for them, the GM watched the tape, the head coach watched the tape, position coach watched the tape but nobody got a chance to sit down and talk with the kid to say well, this is why he opted out, this is why made this decision in his life, but I spent time with him and I spent time with people that know him the best and can vouch for him.”

Kevin kept scouting as much as he could even after his leukemia diagnosis in January 2021, and he told me he purposely scheduled his fifth round of chemo to start the day after the 2021 NFL draft. “The oncologist wanted me to start on Friday,” he texted me. “I looked at him kinda funny, and said that it is a busy weekend for me.”

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When I texted back that his doctor and nurses probably have never had a patient preparing for the NFL draft before, he said, “The best one was when there was a Zoom interview with a player scheduled to start five minutes after the conclusion of a lumbar puncture- they were looking at me like I was nuts.”

“His attitude was just unbelievable,” said Spielman. “He did not want to let everybody else down. His workload was not what it used to be, but he would still do everything he could to make sure he didn’t let down the room or the group.”

Torin says his dad liked to show him film when he was young, and they would sit around and talk about football. As Torin got older, whenever he saw an interesting play or technique, he’d text or call his dad to ask him about it, and he’d quickly learn everything he ever needed to know. “That’s really what he was,” Torin said. “He didn’t really keep secrets. If someone would ask for advice, he would give it and he would give it honestly.”

To use another scouting term, I’d “stand on the table” for Kevin McCabe, an all-time true and generous scout who was an open book and a patient teacher. And I know it would be a crowded table.

“We can find someone else to grade players,” Sholiton said. “It’s hard to find someone to bring that type of spirit and unselfishness.”

Thank you, Kevin, for saying yes to sharing your passion for this sport and its people with a nosy little reporter when you easily could have said no.

“Cheers fellas.” This one’s for Kevin McCabe.

Kevin McCabe’s memorial service is Saturday, Jan. 14, at the City of Woodland Community Center in Woodland, Calif., at 2 p.m. PT. The service will also be live streamed here. Keenan McCabe is a freshman defensive back at the College of Idaho, and the school has set up a scholarship in Kevin’s name that will be awarded to a member of the football team each year.

(Top photo: Kalyn Kahler / The Athletic)

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