Before the Draft

Tis the season for evaluating NFL prospects. NFL scouts work year-round attending colleges in the summer to get a better handle on prospects for the next year with the college season starting in September when much scouting can be done but the evaluation portion of the NFL calendar begins in earnest not long after Christmas.

Bowl season and underclassmen declarations

College Football Explanation

After the college football regular season, the top 25 teams are ranked by a committee and the top 4 teams enter the College Football playoffs – it has not always been this way – I’m not going into the history of the BCS so you can google that if you want to know more but this is the way things are now. As well as the semi-finals of the playoffs there are four other prestigious bowl games. These are played at six fixed venues:

The Rose Bowl (Played at the Rose Bowl in Pasadena, California)

The Sugar Bowl (Played at the Superdome – home of the New Orleans Saints)

The Fiesta Bowl (Played at the University of Phoenix Stadium – home of the Arizona Cardinals)

The Cotton Bowl (Played at AT&T Stadium – home of the Dallas Cowboys)

The Peach Bowl (Played at Mercedes Benz Stadium – home of the Atlanta Falcons)

The Orange Bowl (Played at Hard Rock Stadium – home of the Miami Dolphins)

They rotate the privilege of hosting a semi-final game every three years and in the two years they don’t host the semi-final, a bowl game is played there. For instance one out of every three years, the Sugar Bowl will be played between the 1st and 4th best teams or the 2nd and 3rd best teams in the country for a place in the National Championship and on the other two years, two other teams will play to win the Sugar Bowl.

Its not easy to understand but know that around New Years six important college football games happen – two of them with the winners ending up in the National Championship game. As well as these six games there are a multitude of other bowl games which any college who finishes with a winning record is eligible to be invited too. These are completely random and the matchups are not arranged by a committee as with the six bowls already mentioned. Usually bowl game organisers fight for the most attractive teams for their games that will attract the biggest crowds and the most attention. Every team in college football wants to at least make a bowl game and this is usually a big occasion, no matter how unimportant the bowl game. These are played from the middle of December to early January. The National Championship game being on a Monday night the week after New Year’s Day.

Potential NFL prospects need to start making decisions around now. Players who have finished all of their football eligibility in college will be entering the draft and the more high-profile players must decide whether to play in their team’s bowl game if they have one. Most will choose to do so but the most likely to be drafted high in the first round do have a decision to make as a spate of injuries to high-profile players in bowl games affecting where they would have been drafted if not for the injury has made some think twice about risking themselves in what can often be a meaningless game if not in one of the big bowl games or a semi-final. That decision also applies to underclassmen who have already planned to come out early but those who haven’t already need to make their decision by a set date in early January.

All-star games

There are three main college all-star games like the Pro Bowl but unlike the Pro Bowl these are hugely meaningful for the players. They are only able to be attended by Seniors or graduated Juniors (those who have been in college four years) and take place in early January beginning with the NFLPA Bowl and the East-West Shrine Game and followed by the more prestigious Senior Bowl. There is a hierarchy to these games and players would ideally like to be invited to the Senior Bowl in Mobile, Alabama. This is where all of the best Senior prospects (or Redshirt Juniors) go and will get you noticed quicker. Players will only go to one game, unless there is an injury at the Senior Bowl and often those who performed well at the previous All-star games will be invited to replace the injured player. The coaching staffs are either full NFL coaching staffs from one team, as with the Senior Bowl, or made up of NFL coaches out of work or retired. All team evaluators attend these games and as they pit the best of college football against the best, prospects are watched eagerly in both the practices and the games. (To watch this NFL Network usually screens the East-West Shrine game live followed by the Senior Bowl practices and the game but you’ll also find them on YouTube not long after the practices end.) All-star games are great places to see prospects from some of the less prestigious conferences in Division 1 and small school prospects – pitted against those from the bigger conferences. One of the biggest barriers in evaluating a small school prospect or a prospect that didn’t attend a Power 5 conference college in Division 1, is the level of consistent competition they face. Seeing those prospects battle one-on-one with the best prospects in the country allows you to see how they fare against more serious competition. It also allows you to compare like with like, pitting draft-able prospects against each other, something you can’t always see even in Power 5 conference play.

The Combine

The evaluation process now rumbles on to the NFL Combine in Indianapolis. Most players spend the time between the end of the college season/all-star games training for the Combine. Normally just over 300 potential prospects are invited to Indianapolis for the Combine for testing and drills. Usually there are a number of prospects each year that are drafted that don’t attend the combine but the committee that decides who to invite usually gets a good proportion of it right. (For those that aren’t invited to the Combine there is the chance to attend smaller regional combines and get noticed as well as performing at your pro day, which I will mention later.) They arrive in groups usually arranged as such:

Group 1 – Offensive Linemen, Running Backs

Group 2 – Quarterbacks, Wide Receivers, Tight Ends

Group 3 – Defensive Linemen, Linebackers

Group 4 – Defensive Backs

This can change though. On their first couple of days in Indianapolis they go through official measurements, medical testing, weight room testing and interviews with teams. On their final day, they do on-field testing including position drills and the much-vaunted 40 yard dash. The Combine was originally devised to ensure teams could bring all prospects together in one place and therefore work off the same measurable and medical information. Now the Combine is a televised event and you can watch all four days of the on-field drills on NFL Network. (If you’re trying to get into the Draft, I would recommend doing this mainly to hear Daniel Jeremiah, one of the premier draft analysts, talk about prospects for four days straight.) As well as measuring, height, weight, hand size and arm size, the testing includes lifting a 225lb weight as often as you can in one sitting, vertical jump, broad jump, 40 yard dash (also ten yard splits provided) and shuttle runs. They are also asked to complete the Wonderlic test which is an intelligence test. They then complete positional drills on the field with position coaches from NFL teams but not in helmet and pads so this is mainly about witnessing movement skills rather than testing positional aptitude.

Different measurements and tests are important for different positions – for instance nobody really cares (though some still do) how fast an Offensive Lineman runs 40 yards as he will never have to do it in a game but their arm-length and weight rep testing is important. Undoubtedly the most important parts of the Combine for teams are the interviews where they can get to know the prospects better, and the medical testing where team doctors will be able to conduct a comprehensive battery of tests. When it comes to other measurements, some teams put a lot of stock in the numbers and won’t draft players if they don’t meet minimum standards in measurables like speed (40 yard dash), explosion (vert and broad jumps), hand size and arm length. Some put no stock in the measurables at all and use to their advantage, what they believe is the over or under rating of players based on testing in gym shorts rather than how they perform in pads on the field in pressure filled situations. Some teams like to see prospects exposed in drills so that they can see their pure movement and athletic ability. Almost all of the teams use the Combine at the very least as a pointer for reviewing more game film on prospects – for example they may have thought that a certain prospect looked fast on the field and they liked him but then he ran a poor time at the combine. That team would go back to the game film they have and re-evaluate what they saw from the player in terms of speed, perhaps they were wrong and the player only looks fast because of his intelligence and anticipation making up for his lack of speed.

On the whole though, to quote Mike Mayock, fast guys run fast and slow guys run slow. And as I said earlier, they train for this relentlessly so it’s hard to assess them completely fairly on a workout that has been rehearsed and practiced over and over. But it’s fun to watch and is an important part of the evaluation for a large number of teams who really do take notice of the numbers.

Pro Days

Pro days begin after the Combine and each College will hold a showcase for its Draft eligible players on campus (some smaller Colleges band together in one location for their Pro Day or have their prospects attend one of the larger pro days locally where there is an affiliation). Usually these include the same testing carried out at the Combine events although if players are happy with how they performed in Indianapolis then they often skip this portion of the Pro Day workouts. They will also perform positional drills but these are often heavily scripted and not much is able to be gleaned from watching prospects in this environment. You should also beware the measurables when comparing Pro Day tested players to Combine tested players, the measuring of time is not as scientific and therefore accurate at Pro Days and some surfaces at different stadiums could be considered more conducive to running a fast time than Lucas Oil Stadium. Generally Pro Days are good opportunities for players who weren’t able to test/perform at Indianapolis through choice or injury to show the NFL what they can do in this regard in more familiar confines.

Individual visits

Throughout the Pro Day season and beyond teams begin to host individual visits for prospects at their facilities. They will fly in certain prospects to their city and test them with their own workouts which are private and the results are not accessible. Teams keep individual visits close to their chest but they inevitably get out to the media and are reported. This is why interest in a prospect can no longer be guaranteed from them being hosted by a team on an individual visit, teams often use these visits as a red herring to stop other teams from predicting who they have interest in. Teams will also have had opportunities to interview players at all the previous stages of the pre-draft process just mentioned so if they are very comfortable and extremely interested in a player they may not bring that player in for an individual visit as they don’t want to give away their interest and don’t need to know anything more about the prospect. Teams are only allowed to invite thirty players for individual visits and so are limited in who they can look at more closely in this way.