Starting yesterday, (Sunday 2/28/10), 300 top college football players enlisted for the 2010 NFL Draft began working out in officially recorded tests and drills for NFL teams. The NFL Scouting Combine has become the “it” event for football player evaluation and can make or break a player’s chances of getting drafted in the first round, or getting drafted at all. At the combine, there is no actual gameplay that takes place and no form of football competition going on. Instead, players show up to display their bodies and physical attributes for others to stare at and study. In the future, none of these tests and measurements will end up shaping a player’s career or what they accomplished in the NFL. Each and every one of these players is going to be judged based on how they perform on the field, in pads and helmets with 21 other guys on a field on a 1st down and 10. But before we get to that point, we have to decide which guys are best built to have the greatest chance to succeed in the physically demanding environment of the NFL.

That leaves us with the million dollar questions (literally), and here is how one objective fan would answer these 3 questions, after having studied the college-to-pro transition the last few years:

(1.) WHAT CAN WE LEARN FROM THE SCOUTING COMBINE? … Well, we really can LEARN a lot from the NFL Draft Scouting Combine. In fact, we learn much more about each individual player than we ever could have known from watching film. We learn how tall a player is, how much he weighs, how many reps of 225 pounds he can bench press, how fast he runs the 40-yard dash, how quickly he completes a three-cone shuttle drill, and how high he can jump. It doesn’t end there. We learn the size of a player’s wrists and hands, his percentage of body fat, how he conducts himself in interviews with team officials, and how he scores on intelligence tests. We can create a full-page grid of information about each and every individual player for our use. Really, there is much to learn and there’s nothing wrong with legally obtaining as much information about a player as possible before we spend 20 million dollars on selecting him. And the thing is, these guys are so strong, fast, and confident that a lot of them like the process. It’s sad that we view these players like animals in a picking line, but they’re some of the most gifted athletic men in the world and feel comfortable displaying it for the world to see.

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(2.) HOW DOES MEASURING A PLAYER’S ATTRIBUTES HELP US DETERMINE HOW WELL HE WILL PLAY FOOTBALL? … This is the easiest question to apply examples to, but the most difficult to predict future results for. For example, 2 years ago an unheralded running back out of East Carolina ran the 40-yard dash in 4.24 seconds, the fastest recorded time in combine history. This player immediately gained recognition as the fastest player in his class, and got drafted in the late 1st-round. He was Chris Johnson, today’s top running back in the league and most explosive, game-changing player in the NFL. Johnson would have likely slipped into the 2nd or even 3rd round had we not measured his record-breaking speed. But the next year, the Oakland Raiders took note of Maryland wide receiver Darrius Heyward-Bey’s remarkable 40-yard dash time and drafted him in the top 10 as the first receiver, only to have a tremendously unsuccessful first year. . . .

Let’s do another comparison. At the 2007 combine, Adam Carricker and LaMarr Woodley were both listed as high-end defensive ends competing for draft position as pass rushers. Carricker benched 33 reps of 225 pounds and blew away scouts with his numbers, and got drafted as the 3rd defensive end with the #13 overall pick. He has struggled for playing time in his career with the Rams and has 2 sacks in 3 seasons at the defensive line position. Woodley decided not to work out at all, a choice a player can make, and he wasn’t drafted until round 2 with the 46th pick. It cost him millions of dollars, but he has 39 sacks in 3 seasons as a pass rushing linebacker for the Steelers, and 1 Super Bowl and 1 Pro Bowl as one of the premier defensive players in the league. . . .

So how do we know how much stock to put into a player’s attributes? To me, you use the combine numbers to fill in the blanks and compare players against one another in ways you couldn’t with film. We might be able to determine if their college talents will translate similarly to the NFL based on side-by-side comparisons. If a team likes a WR who dominated Division II ball and set every record, we need to measure how fast and strong he is compared to an average Division I prospect to put his numbers in perspective. And if a QB of a National Championship team won the Heisman Trophy and set records, we need to use his measurements to decide what he really looks like in comparison to the quarterbacks of the other teams that didn’t have that kind of talent around him. Basically, the combine can give us raw numbers to compare players against each other that we never would have been able to compare based on their college career paths. It’s a great way to push players to compete against each other and help us determine how they might fit in with new teammates and coaches at the next level. It might help us determine their success in the NFL, or it might not.

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That leaves us with the last question. (3.) SHOULD WE PLACE MORE EMPHASIS ON WHAT WE SAW FROM THE PLAYER IN GAMES, OR WHAT WE MEASURED ABOUT THE PLAYER AT THE COMBINE? … The answer to this question ultimately determines how much value the scouting combine has. Each NFL franchise’s scout team will have a different answer, but they all certainly account for both. While I am in support of the combine in regards to the previous 2 questions, I am strongly against it here. I think much more emphasis needs to be put on a player’s in-game performance than off-field measurements. Statistically, a player’s 40-yard dash, vertical leap, and bench press might actually mean more than his 4-year collegiate sack and tackle totals. But studying game film and on-field performance and dominance comes above anything else. The NFL is about discipline, hard work, and execution in 20-second intervals, or however long a single play might last. How a player interacts with his teammates, performs on the field, displays endurance over a full game, complies with coach orders, and dominates physically are all things that a game-tape study can reveal to a scout. If a player is not motivated to play his best just because he played for a sub-par college team, then we should take that into consideration as we watch it, instead of disregarding it and determining his motivation with the combine interviews. Work ethic and performance is something we can’t measure with stats, either during a career or at a combine, but it is something that can be noticed on film. The combine is great for numbers and comparisons, but we really learn about player’s talents from how they play the game on the field. Maybe we should start spending more time watching players’ game tapes and less time watching them show off in front of hundreds of scouts judging their every step.

The debate about the value of the NFL scouting combine will continue on every year. Each NFL season will include examples of rookies being drafted too low because of their lacking measurements, or too high because they did so well in a 1-week test fest. There’s no “right” answer to the important questions about the NFL combine, and it’s important to take each and every factor into account when speculating about a player’s potential. Sometimes, those factors might be something like having a bad week during testing. You never know, and that’s why it’s fascinating to watch teams draft players to their teams and find out what affected their decision. In the end, how a player performs as a professional will always overshadow any tests or measurements. The combine determines when a player is drafted, not how their NFL career will be judged.