With the NFL Combine in full force, rumors are sure to swirl about players and their stats– but does it really matter?
Early March every year, hundreds of NFL pundits, coaches, and executives make their annual pilgrimage to Indianapolis to see college football’s finest offering of draft eligible rising stars. The NFL Scouting Combine, the professional league’s way of showcasing upcoming talent since 1985. Players are run through a series of tests ranging from the 40-yard dash to more position specific drills, all while working out in a tank top and shorts. For many NFL hopefuls, it’s judgement day.
One bad step on a bag drill and a player could easily fall down the draft boards. One tenth of a second too slow on the 40-yard dash could place a once-surefire first-rounder into the mid-rounds, possibly missing out on millions of dollars.
To some, the NFL Scouting Combine is a staple, a tried-and-true method of recognizing players and solidifying their spot on a team’s draft board. For others, it’s a semantical way of thinking that fails to properly assess players and project their future.
In recent years, the Combine has lost its footing as the status quo for measuring players, with a growing number of NFL executives and scouts choosing to instead focus on college film and tangible traits instead of how quick a prospect can run around three-cones. The Combine has also not been immune to the age of opting-out, with a breadbasket of players choosing not to hurt their draft stock by not participating in drills or not take part at all.
“It’s not even the working out portion. To me, you grade them off the tape, you don’t grade off somebody out here in pajamas, running the 40 with no defender around,” Lions head coach Dan Campbell said about the Combine.
For him, the biggest piece of the event was the interview aspect, where he gets to sit down with players and get to connect on a personal level, “to me it’s more, at this point, just to be able to sit with these guys. They get the medical during the week, but for us to be able to do these interviews is to me the biggest part of all this.”
With the rise of analytics in the sport, the Combine is now seen as archaic, and without value. The drills with no competition in a controlled environment don’t represent football and definitely don’t emulate the nature of the sport. With sports training facilities like Michael Johnson Performance and EXOS offering Combine specific training, it seems as though the original idea and goal of the Combine has devolved into a Ironman-esque track meet.
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EXOS has honed in the idea of Combine and pro-day training with over 20 years of experience. The program offers nutrition, weight-lifting programs, and injury rehab all in the name of making players the best they can be at the Combine.
And it’s worked, with the Arizona-based company has churned out 206 first-round picks and 1,085 draftees total. Yet, the training follows more along the lines of a rigid structure only meant to benefit athletic prowess. Yes, the ultimate goal is to perform well at the Combine, but NFL prospects should ideally become infatuated with the idea with outcomes well after the draft, not have tunnel vision on a broad jump statistic.
A 2016 University of California, Berkeley study found that a better Combine performance rarely correlates with receiving a higher draft pick, a statistic that would theoretically be enough to blow the entire idea of the Combine out of the water.
The study stated that, “it definitely comes as a surprise that most of the Combine results lack any prediction power for neither draft order nor NFL performance. Raw athleticism may not be as important as people make it to be at the professional level.”
Emotions and tradition aside, the idea of the Combine is a logical fallacy in and of itself. The majority of the players invited to the NFL Combine and that subsequently go onto the NFL are physically talented. Nearly all of them have the raw athleticism and talent it takes on a purely tangible level. What differentiates players from then is the one thing the league’s Combine format doesn’t take into account, the intangible features.
Football and the NFL itself is a majorly mental game. It’s cutthroat, puzzling, and meant to throw a player off their game. A prospect’s ability to handle that doesn’t come in the form of running 40 yards and doing bag drills. It stems from their capacity to play the sport– in other words, looking at the film.
“In the end it’s the tape, the tape, the tape… what you see players do in games,” Denver Broncos’ GM George Patton said in an interview to ESPN. “Again the rest of it part of the evaluation and you want as much information as you can have. But the biggest component will always be how did he perform in games and how will that translate into how he fits into your building.”
NFL executives are starting to embrace the change away from the Combine with teams such as the Los Angeles Rams and the Green Bay Packers notably omitting their assistant coaches from Indianapolis this year, instead opting for their high management and scouts to meet with recruits at the Combine.
For some teams like the San Francisco 49ers, the NFL Combine’s influence in their war room is ever so shrinking, with general manager John Lynch testifying that, “it’s all a piece of the puzzle,” when referring to basing decisions off of Combine stats, “like little weights that tip the scales as you stack them.
More members of the NFL’s brass are changing their viewpoints to more applicable scenarios such as senior showcase bowls where the players are pitted against each other in fully padded competition. Some forego the dog and pony show altogether, electing to focus on a prospect’s film in college and using newly captured data from recent technology to better make educated decisions. Either way, the NFL Combine is losing its place in the sport slowly but surely.
However, there’s one mainstay of the Combine a majority of the league is willing to keep and has overwhelming support for– medical examinations.
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“We’re not going to draft players sight unseen,” one NFL personnel director told ESPN. “It’s unreasonable to think people are going to say ‘Hey, you tore your ACL last year, but we can’t look at it with our own people and we should take you in the first [round] anyway.’ How would that even be a consideration in any fashion?”
The medical exam is the NFL’s form of auditing and doing due diligence on a player prior to making a decision on whether or not they want to spend valuable draft picks on joining them. The Combine is the perfect centralized position to do so. This bastion of the event makes it a tough uphill battle for the Combine to be abolished, however with the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic in 2021, NFL teams were forced to seek alternative options to do the tests without the established Combine to host the tests.
Most teams chose to do the tests in their home facilities, but executives cited logistics and travel as a major hinderance.
If teams used the Combine as their sole piece of evidence on a player, the NFL would be a drastically different landscape today. By the Combine’s and society’s standards, players like Tom Brady and Jarvis Landry would’ve been laughed out of the stadium, while players like Byron Jones and Tim Tebow would’ve been heralded as glimmering gems and in the Hall-of-Fame by now.
That’s where the disparity of the Combine rises and the questions start to swirl. Is the Combine truly a good test of a player’s to-be impact on a team? The frank answer, no. It isn’t. There are simply too many factors in the game of football to judge, especially when the Combine is packed to the brim with drills one has prepared for.
This is why pro days have much more say in a team’s decision making. Usually held a couple of weeks after the Combine, pro days are run by the university and are confined to the players (give or take) of that school. This allows teams to have much more one-on-one time with players, judge their character, and put them in more unfamiliar positions to see how they’ll react.
Based on the Combine, players like Joe Haden, Drew Brees, and Orlando Brown would have gone overlooked. Haden’s speed drew serious concerns, but ended up making multiple Pro Bowls with the Browns and enjoyed a fruitful career in the NFL. Brees’ height was cause for alarm, yet the quarterback is set to be a first-ballot hall-of-famer.
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The examples of players proving their Combine performance wrong is endless, digging into the event’s premise that it can properly judge future players.
By this point, every NFL fan has seen the infamous image of Tom Brady’s draft physical. The picture paints a vivid image that the Combine isn’t all numbers and black and white. NFL players fit into a gray area littered with outside variables and factors that no amount of baseless testing can truly predict.
This year’s Combine already has its fair share of winners and losers, but no one is flying up or down the draft boards barring some extracurricular activities. Bryce Young measured in at 5’10”, almost 3 inches shorter than what the University of Alabama’s athletics website had him listed at. Will he fall out of the top five? Probably not.
Nolan Smith ran the fastest time by a defensive lineman in history in the 40-yard dash. Will he crack the top-10? Probably not. These ideal numbers set by years of faster and faster athletes have done nothing except blow the 40-yard dash’s context in the game well out of proportion.
Just take one good look at John Ross III.
How much impact does a 40-yard time have for a defensive lineman except for lateral speed when chasing down a runner out of the pocket? Little to none.
On-the-fringe players with much to prove like Stetson Bennett, Jalin Hyatt, and Will Levis should be judged along the lines of tape, in-person interviews, and tests that are more applicable to their respective positions.
Only two years removed from the Jets’ draft disaster that was Zach Wilson, teams are determined to avoid overvaluing non-competitive and out-of-environment performances by big name players. Wilson had an exceptionally strong showing at his pro-day but amounted to little in the NFL, being benched several times.
The NFL Combine doesn’t seem to be on its way out anytime soon, but for viewers or teams putting a large emphasis on the numbers… buyer beware, there’s a whole lot more to football than how high someone can jump.
