The art of scanning in soccer and how it relates to QBs

Since we're all busy speculating on quarterbacks, I just read this fantastic article in The Athletic about "scanning" in professional soccer, and I immediately thought about its implications in Football. Here's a twitter thread on scanning by a sports scientist who studied it if you can't read the paywalled article, with video clips of players doing it well.

Scanning is the skill where players are constantly looking around the field, processing the information, and building a mental map of where every other player on the pitch is located. This skill is extremely important, especially for midfielders.

Doing this well gives players a huge advantage when they get the ball -- their first movement with the ball is critical, particularly in terms of the speed in which they need to make the right decision. This can be everything from how they position their body to anticipate a defender challenging them, which direction they immediately move in, to quickly making that perfect pass. All of these decisions seem very similar to a quarterback avoiding pressure, quickly reading the secondary and executing a pass.

In soccer, scanning is measurable - you can count how frequently the player looks around the pitch and they use a stat of Average Scans Per Second to measure this skill. High scores correlate very closely with good outcomes, and low scores with bad outcomes. The best players in the game tend to be scanners with very high scores. Lionel Messi is one of the greatest scanners ever.

It seems like in the NFL, we don't have a concrete metric to measure this kind of mental processing and have to rely on a bunch of other data to try and infer this kind of trait, and I think this is why you end up with so many dud QBs.

So who out there in this draft class do we think is tops in collecting and processing information and building these mental maps, and is there a good indicator that does exist to measure it?