Building on yesterday’s post, I decided to crown a combine MVP because it’s February and there’s nothing else to do. I looked at each player’s combine results, courtesy of the great NFLSavant.com, in four different tests.
40-yard dash
There were 268 players with 40-yard dash times posted at NFL Savant. I ran a regression using weight as the input and 40-yard time as the output, and the best-fit formula (R^2 of 0.75) was:
Using this formula, Jadeveon Clowney, with a weight of 266 pounds, would be projected to run the 40 in 4.91 seconds. Since he actually ran the 40 in 4.53 seconds, he gets credited for finishing +0.38 seconds above expectation. That was the best of any player in Indianapolis this year. The table below shows, for each of the 268 players (the table, by default, displays only the top 10, but you can change that in the dropdown box), their weight, their actual 40 time, their expected 40 time, and the difference. Auburn tackle Greg Robinson hopes be a top-five pick, and his 40 time does a good job displaying his athleticism. Pittsburgh’s Aaron Donald comes in third, but there will be plenty of reasons to talk about him later.
Bench Press
For the bench press, I used height and weight as my two inputs; both variables were extremely significant statistically, and this makes sense. Heavier players have an advantage in the bench press, while players with long arms (who are usually taller) are at a disadvantage. As a result, the best-fit formula (R^2 of 0.54) for the 213 men who bench pressed was:
The best job on the bench was produced by North Carolina center Russell Bodine. At 310 pounds and 6’3, Bodine has a good bench-pressing frame… but that only meant that he was expected to rep 225 pounds 28 times. In reality, he produced a combine best 42 reps (no other player had more than 36), crowning him as the strongest man in Indianapolis… whether you adjust for height and weight, or not. Number 7 on the adjusted list? Aaron Donald. But we’ll get to him later.
Three Cone Drill
Like the bench press, the assumption (at least by me) is that the 3-cone drill is biased against taller players. But unlike the bench, it’s better to be lighter in this drill. As it turns out, both height and weight were statistically significant at all relevant levels, but being taller was correlated with better scores; that means the coefficient on the height variable was negative, so the best-fit formula to project 3-cone time (R^2 of 0.68) was:
215 men who participated in the 3-Cone drill, with the best grade coming from a player with a seventh round grade; the second-best effort came from Michael Sam’s less-heralded defensive end teammate at Missouri, Kony Ealy, who should go in the first round. Number four on the list was Aaron Donald, who incredibly produced top-seven performances in each of our first three metrics. If there was a super freak at the combine, it was Donald.
Vertical Jump
Initially, I used both height and weight to predict vertical jump, but the height variable proved not to be significant. Therefore, the best-fit formula to predict the vertical jump was simply:
Baylor’s Lache Seastrunk and Nebraska’s Stanley Jean-Baptiste tied for the best vertical jump at the combine of the 260 men who participated. Considering Jean-Baptiste weighed 17 more pounds than Seastrunk, the Nebraska product gets a higher grade in this category. But it was Buffalo’s Khalil Mack — another potential top-five pick — who produced the best weight-adjusted vertical, jumping 40 inches in the air despite weighing 251 pounds. Then again, that’s nothing compared to Mario Williams, who in 2006, jumped 40.5 inches at 295 pounds.
Finally, I came up with an overall grade using these four numbers. To do that, I converted each player’s grade relative to expectation in each category into a standard deviations above/below expectation. Then, I added those four values together to come up with a final grade (if a player did not participate in a drill, he is given a zero for that category, which doesn’t hurt or help him). Donald’s 40 times was 2.35 standard deviations above expectation, and he was 2.13 standard deviations above average in the bench press, 2.18 in the three-cone drill, and 0.64 in the vertical jump. Add those four numbers together, and Donald gets a grade of +7.3, the best in the combine.
Number two on the list is Georgia Southern’s Jerick McKinnon, which jives with a similar study by the Wall Street Journal. McKinnon was a quarterback in a triple-option offense in college, and he’s most famous for leading his team in rushing in the Eagles’ upset win over Florida. He will have to adjust to a new position and a massive upgrade in level of competition, but he has all the athleticism he’ll need to be a pro running back. Jeff Janis is a player Doug Farrar profiled before the combine, and then Janis tore up Indianapolis. All of his metrics were impressive, but the three-cone number (particularly intriguing for a 6’3 wide receiver) really stands out; expect to hear how sneaky fast Janis is this fall. The table is fully sortable, and you can sort by the last column to find that the least athletic player was a quarterback from Cornell; presumably, that wouldn’t have won you much money in Vegas.
But the clear star of the combine was Donald, who is anything but a workout warrior. Playing for an anonymous Pitt team, Donald put up Ndamukong Suh type numbers in 2013. He’s a player with few flaws on film (he led the country in tackles for loss with 28.5) and a dominant combine should cement his status as a high draft pick in May. In equally unsurprising news, Mack and Clowney both finished with top-six overall grades, while Virginia Tech quarterback Logan Thomas was the clear most athletic quarterback in Indianapolis.
The silent story in Indianapolis was the horrific performance by Michael Sam. He finished with the sixth-lowest grade of all 268 players, only besting three quarterbacks, an FCS offensive lineman, and a linebacker on one of the worst defenses in the Big Ten. Sam’s story is a polarizing one even though it shouldn’t be — your author is rooting for him — but the combine is the ultimate objective test, and Sam clearly failed this one. Everyone knows that the combine bears only tangential reality to playing football, but a miserable showing in Indianapolis won’t do anything to dissuade fears that Sam doesn’t have the physical ability to be a starting defensive end or outside linebacker in the pros. In addition, Oregon running back/wide receiver De’Anthony Thomas — nicknamed Black Mamba and considered one of the most athletic players in the country just two years ago — had a horrific combine, too. A 4.5 40 can be overlooked on some level since we all know how fast Thomas is, but a 32 inch vertical leap from a player weighing 174 pounds is ugly, and should put an end to the Percy Harvin comparisons (4.39 40, 37.5″ vertical at 192 pounds).
