The Bengals' new-look scouting staff, trying to project the weekend's cantankerous weather as well as sleek edge rushers, has converged at the season's first major college all-star game for practices leading up to Tuesday's East-West Shrine Bowl in Frisco, Texas.

Then, director of player personnel Duke Tobin hopes to skate through the ice to the Panini Senior Bowl in Mobile, Ala., for the workouts around the Jan. 31 game with some of his beefed-up staff's new tools.

"More efficient and more eyes on more players," says assistant general manager Mike Potts, who oversees Bengals' college scouting. "Multiple looks at more players on both the college and pro side, and that's through seeing them in person on visits and watching them on tape as well."

That's courtesy of three hires Tobin made back in the spring that included veteran NFL college and pro scouts Josh Hinch and Tyler Ramsey, as well as scouting research analyst Trey LaBounty, and they say they can see their work starting to bubble up as draft season eases into full boil.

Ramsey, back in his old stomping grounds that he canvassed for a decade with the Seahawks in the Mountain West, and Hinch, bringing his SEC experience with the Patriots to bolster assistant general manager Trey Brown's deep roots in Alabama and Georgia, have been here before.

Yet no one's quite sure if they've ever seen a guy like LaBounty on the scouting trail.

"I'm sure there are a lot of guys around the league that don't have as well-rounded of a skill set as he has," Potts says.

LaBounty, 25, once a preferred walk-on defensive end at Stanford and then a grad school tight end at Miami University who also happens to have two master's degrees and majors in information technology while dabbling in program applications, has been both getting his feet wet and diving in.

You've got to believe he's the first NFL scout with a master's in "Data science with focus in social problems."

"I give props to these guys. I've been really thankful that they've allowed me into the different processes and genuinely been willing to listen to my input," LaBounty says. "I've got a different background from the technical aspect, and it has allowed me to come in and ask, 'How can we streamline our processes and make them more efficient?' And then what are the areas where we can also go in and create new ones?"

Half of LaBounty's first season consists of learning the Bengals' system so he knows how to best service the scouts and pitch in where needed. He's made school trips with scouting executive Andrew Johnson to take notes on not only how and where information is gathered, but how to improve scouts' prep for future trips. He's also looking at numbers and tape to find players on the periphery and forwards them to the area scouts.

"Guys who are maybe more under the radar that we haven't got as much of a look at. Guys who got flagged for some reason, statistically, or whatever made them pop up," LaBounty says. "Hey, this is a guy you should take a look at. Maybe this guy's not worth taking a look at. Kind of like a filter. Time is precious."

The other half of his year has been spent teaming with Tyler Gross, the club's senior application developer. As Potts says, the Bengals are always looking for ways to best organize and filter their seemingly bottomless vat of information.

"We can run reports that can save us a lot of time and allow us to focus more of our time and efforts on evaluating players and writing reports and getting the draft board in order," Potts says. "More so than some of the things in the system that can take a lot of time if you don't have a guy in that type of role."

That may be where his biggest impact has come as LaBounty and Gross have tackled projects ranging from automating the dizzying data entry spawned by the rapidly changing college game to the more in-depth challenges of streamlining the sprawling personnel programs.

"Trey and Tyler have done an incredible job of wiping the slate clean on a lot of that automated stuff with the programs they've built," says director of football research Sam Francis, pleasantly surprised at how much LaBounty and Gross have racked up since June. "The information we have is cleaner, the depth of the information is greater, and we're building on the systems we've had in place."

There have been meetings these days when they canvas the list of draft prospects, as well as looming free agents already in the league, and, as often happens, they spitball concepts and ideas.

What about some of these off-size nose tackles in the college game who can slide over to play the three technique? How many snaps are they getting? And, in what alignment are they being productive or not? Or, if they're talking about prospects already in the league, is this linebacker being asked to do something he hasn't done before?

Instead of remaining just an idea to be researched, LaBounty can spin off, set up some parameters, and right then show a short list to, say, assistant general manager Steven Radicevic, the point person in free agency.

That's why they've embedded LaBounty in the daily personnel interplay ("We talk multiple times a day," Potts says) instead of relying on computer people from another wing of the building parachuting into the draft room to deliver presentations, and then leaving before sitting in again.

"It's bridging the gap between the two worlds," Francis says. "The scouts may be in there having a conversation about the plausibility of something, and it may not cross their minds that they have access to that information.

"But he's part of that conversation. Not only can he answer the question, he has a better understanding of the types of questions and ideas the scouts may have, and the scouts now have a better understanding of what he has access to. That moves it forward. That never happens if he's sitting in another room."

The conversations now crackle through Frisco and Mobile before they come back home and prepare for next month's NFL scouting combine with that new look.

"The crux of analytics and football is efficient access to actionable information," Francis says. "Especially in scouting."

Now they just have to project this weekend's weather.