1) Crest: The crest grows with the bird. If they have small crests at 16 weeks they will have proportionality small crest at 6 months, 12 months, 18 months etc. Yes, many of the 1st gen GFF birds are none crested or have small crests. It would probably be a good idea to "test mate" roosters to see if they have two copies or one copy of the cresting gene. If they have two copies 100% of their offspring with non-crested birds will have crest. If they only have one copy then they will produce both crested and non-crest offspring with non-crested birds. Some people are making Cream Legbar crosses such as Olive eggs with brown brown egg breeds, or sex-linked crossed with other breeds. If these other breeds are non-crested, then they will work to test you cockerels. You can test you breeding hens too if you cross them with non-crested cockerels. I might also me a good idea to test for the blue egg gene when you test mate too. The lack of the blue egg gene doesn't seem to be a problem in the US, but it is always nice to know what your breeders are passing on so you don't see problems down the road. Since you have 5 pullets that are crested, I would select one or two breeders from the crested group and not breed the non-crested hens (unless they have some really desirable trait that none of the other hens do.)
2) Cockerels size. When you only have 3 to choose from it make choosing really hard, but if I have a big group I usually weigh and measure them all (weight, length of back, length of keel, width at shoulder, width at hips, depth) and eliminate the bottom 50% as potential breeders. Size is one indication of vigor so keeping the birds that are closer to the require weight in the SOP will help produce a good flock. Underweight and Overweight birds are both have higher mortality rates than the rest of the flock so their is a limit on how big you want them to be, but if they are active and foraging, then you know they aren't too big. If they are having a hard time making it up to the 18" high roost or catching the hens, then you may want to go with a smaller boy.
3) Color. People are often attracted to a breed by their color and that is the first thing they want to focus on. We are cautioned over and over again to NOT let color factor more than the shape/type of the bird, the health of the bird, of the egg laying ability of the bird. In the first year of breeding you should be harder on the color of the cockerel than the hens. A quality flock is not created is one year. They are developed over decades of breeding.
4) Defects/faults: crooked combs on the cockerels would be a major fault (straight combs that flop a little a minor fault), Thumb prints on combs would be a fault, non-crested birds a fault, high tail angles would be a fault, undersized birds would be a fault etc... They say to never, never, never breed a hen and a cockerel with the same fault. In my first generation I didn't have enough selection to be able to offset all the faults in my hens with my cockerels, so I just hatch a lot. Every single one of the birds I hatch had faults, but for this falls hatch I have hens now paired with cockerels who don't share any of their same faults. The hens all have faults and the cockerels all have faults, they just don't have the same faults, so these faults will not be locked into the line and I will be able to breed out one fault at a time and work on the next fault the following season with out providing myself a way out of the corner. So...I guess when you are looking at the faults of the cockerels the question should be which hens or hens will I mate him to. If you choose two hens that are small, then you may want the larger cockerel. If you choose two pullets with really large floppy combs, then you may want the cockerel with the smallest comb. If you choose a hen with a high tail angle, then you will need a cockerel with a low tail angle etc.
After you have looked at all the birds and think that you know which ones you want to keep and which you want to breed. watch them for another few days and go one your intuition. If everything you see on paper says cockerel #1, but after a few days you still have a feeling like you should keep #3 even though you aren't sure why, then follow that gut feeling and keep #3 because 9 times out of 10 you are going to be happy you did.
