If it wasn't clear, it was intended to be self-deprecating because I was scout team.
Let me just give you my experience and the experience I've seen in my time around college football. Experiences may vary and different coaches may be different.
Scout team goes like this:
Each week coaches will put out a depth chart (it used to be required, not sure if it still is). That depth chart will be what is called "two-deep" and will essentially be the players that will make up the majority of players "dressed." Being dressed means you have a uniform for that game. If you think of the famous scene in Rudy when players are throwing their jersey on the desk of the coach, they're giving up their spot of being dressed that game for Rudy.
Typically, players not expected to be on the depth chart will make up your scout team. That team is just what it sounds like, they are intended to give the players who will actually play a way to scout their upcoming opponent. Throughout the week, you will mimic the players and plays of your upcoming opponent. This means you won't even be doing what your own team does. It may even mean you won't be playing your own position in practice that week. Playing a team with a fast option QB and you're a pocket passer? You probably don't even get a rep in practice that week, they'll most likely use a reserve DB or WR in that role who did it in high school.
Because you are copying the opponent, there is little growth potential on scout team. You are there to run core plays and concepts over-and-over and be the sacrificial lamb to the two-deep. My experience involved being a force player at S and the opponent liked to run power. A 180-pound freshman scout player playing force against the starting RS Sr. G was just as fun as it sounds.
On scout you are the lowest of the low. You aren't there to develop or grow your game, you are there to help the players who are going to play get prepared. Coaches will tell you to take a hit differently. To take a different shoulder. To run it again and again and again, even though the two-deep is rotating in fresh players. They're not trying to keep you fresh; you aren't playing.
You are a tackling dummy. You are a practice player.
Being scout also means you are invisible to the top coaches. It's fairly known scout players are going to be in group one. The 5 AM group. You're going to get trained by the assistant S&C if you're lucky. Most likely it's a student S&C for your group. You aren't getting the same meal plan and attention to dieticians as the two-deep. You are working with the assistant to the assistant coach in spring camp, just hoping to get a chance to catch an eye and avoid scout.
Walk-ons aren't even seen as humans most of the time, just "that guy" or "get that guy in there" when they need to replace the corpse of the last poor scout sap out there.
The reason you hear/see/read players so excited to get into two-deep is the exponential jump in quality of life at practice. The HC might learn your name and number.
You even live a different life in film session, where it's almost completely downside because how are you going to stand out trying to mimic #33 from the upcoming opponent on a play you haven't practiced all year? Your assistant to the assistant is trying to become the assistant in his own career and will deuce all over you in film session at first chance to make sure it isn't on him.
Life on scout suuuuuucccccckkkkkkssss. And coaches want it that way because if scout was fun, players would want to do it instead of killing themselves to make two-deep.
Imagine you do all of that to sit in the crowd on game day with the rest of the students. While the two-deep gets their names in print and disseminated to media folks to read/see.
The portal era has probably changed a lot of things, but now if you're on scout for more than a year you also get cut as a reward for your sacrifice.
