NFL Scouting Combine: 2/18 - 2/24

by MaPatsFan on Feb 10, 2009 10:28 PM EST in New England Patriots News

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With little more than a week to the scouting combine, young players looking to enter the NFL are preparing for one of the biggest performances of their careers. The NFL Combine, along with other events, is a series of 7 drills designed to test an athlete's speed, agility, coordination, strength, and explosiveness. All players do the same drills; wide receivers must do the bench press while 300 pound offensive linemen do the 20 yard shuttle.

I thought I would run through the drills and their importance here even though much of the same information can be found on the NFL's combine site.

40 Yard Dash - The importance of this is fairly obvious - it tests speed. However, the combine doesn't just time an athlete's 40 yard time; they time at 10, 20, and 40 yards. It's a test of how quickly the explode off the line and how quickly they reach top speed.

Bench Press - Participants raise a 225 pound bar as many times as they can manage. It's a test of strength, pure and simple.

Vertical Jump - Participants stand flat-footed and try to swat as many plastic flags on a pole as they can. This drill tests vertical leap capabilities, quickness, and explosiveness.

Broad Jump - This jump is done from a standing position and the players jump forward as far as they can manage. This exercise, along with the vertical jump, give scouts a great idea of a players explosiveness and power. The broad jump has been done for a long time, so teams can compare these results to previous players and get a picture of how a young athlete may fare.

3 Cone Drill - This is a drill designed to test a player's ability to bend, pivot, and shift body weight. This is a classic receiver or defensive back series of movement where the ability to to shift and change direction is tested.

20-Yard Shuttle - Players run 5 yards in one direction, change direction and run 10 yards, change direction again and run 5 yards to end up where they started. According to nfl.com, this drill tests a player's ability to drop low and accelerate.

60-Yard Shuttle - This drill is 5, 10, 15, 20, 10 yard shuttles, changing direction after each shuttle.

Doing well on these drills can ultimately affect where a player gets drafted and, to some extent, their payday. Players will train for months before the combine in order to improve their chances of doing well. After all, it's the difference between a great start and a mediocre start. However, you just never know. Remember our boy Tom? Ouch...

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what i'd really love to see

Is a scientific breakdown of how these scores translate into performance in the NFL at each position. As pointed out, we know they affect draft position and payday and thus variable isolation is more difficult, but given the decades of games being logged there’s got to be enough data now to check on this stuff.

In my humble outsiders opinion, the 40 has got to be one of the most overrated statistics for so many reasons:

-Inconsistency in measurement: at the combine I’m sure they have a uniform set of electronic controls doing the timing, but below that D1 programs often rely on stopwatch and paper recording combined with human observation. For a stat where differences of .05 seconds mean so much, depending on some coach’s stopwatch reflex seems absurd

-Failure to account for torso rotation: How many receiver routes are you really going to run in your career where you go 40 yards before looking for the ball? This kind of postural change in a game situation can significantly affect a player’s speed

-Failure to account for directional change: Save for breaking a long run or return, there isn’t a player on either side of the ball that is going to run 40 yards unimpeded and without a cut, lean, or turn; their ability to navigate these kinds of things efficiently will dramatically affect their time from point A to point B. Separating this out into the 3 cone drill mitigates the problem with this particular point, but again the problem exists that the player is being tested in an isolated context rather than a more practical, game simulated situation

-Padding differences: players wear different levels of pads while playing, even those at the same/corresponding position (obviously you wouldn’t compare WR 40s to LB 40s). Not only do you have a difference in encumbrance, but a player’s playing posture is also going to dictate how much they are affected by said encumbrance

-Closing speed: particularly important for DBs; the 40 measures players “jump” from a standstill, but CBs and safeties and even LBs need to have their ability to accelerate out of lateral runs/shifts tested too. I don’t care how fast you are out of the blocks down the track, I care about how fast you are able to close that gap to the receiver running a crossing route when you’ve been sliding/shuffling to your left.

Anyway, I’m sure the NFL has guys far smarter than me who have demonstrably shown why these statistics matter, and that someone could effectively counterargue any of the points I’ve made. I’d just love to see some hard data on why I should believe in this combine stuff :)

by jctsai12 on Feb 12, 2009 11:32 AM EST reply actions