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I saw this headline, and I’m like, “wow,” is this where we’re at? C’mon people.
“UConn’s Byron Jones wows with incredible broad jump.”
How often do you see anybody doing the broad jump during a football game?
Let’s take a step back for a second.
I understand a good broad jump perhaps means Jones is an explosive athlete, but how are his instincts?
New York Post Headline – “Mariota, Jameis wow Jets, NFL, with sterling combine.”
Who cares?
Let me read you the scouting report on the workout prior to the draft of a quarterback who played in the league for quite some time.
“The guy is so skinny that if he turned sideways he looked like an exclamation point. He was not muscular; he didn’t have a lot of definition to him. His release was fine, but his arm was below average. And his athletic tests were good, but not exceptional; I’d say a little bit average. It was a very poor workout. Maybe the worst quarterback workout I’d seen in a while.”
That scouting report was from an AFC team. Do you know who it was about?
Joe Montana.
To evaluate quarterbacks on how they throw against air, with no reading of coverages. To evaluate quarterbacks on how they run
and jump. Wow, is this misguided.
Tom Brady and Peyton Manning are bad athletes, and have always been bad athletes.
The Jets picked a DE/OLB Vernon Gholston in the first round after he lit up the combine.
How’d that work out?
Yes Gholston ran under 4.6, but it was on a straight line. What that forty time doesn’t tell you is that he has stiff hips and has trouble changing directions, which hurts in space.
Gholston also did a nice job in the weightlifting drills.
But his weight room strength didn’t translate to the field.
You have to be an absolute idiot as a GM to put too much stock on the combine workouts.
The best stuff you get out of this event are the myriad medical tests. All the poking and prodding you hear about by team doctors and trainers, which might be annoying and demeaning to the prospects, but it’s very important in the evaluation process.
Another important aspect to the combine are the interviews teams do with players at the Crown Plaza Hotel in downtown Indy.
Each team can interview 60 players. You get 15 minutes with each of them. A bullhorn goes off at the hotel at the conclusion of each 15 minutes segment.
These are very helpful. You can get a feel for the players’ intelligence (often the coaches and scouts ask the player to draw up plays on a grease board). You can also get a sense of the player’s personality and attitude.
These things are helpful.
But running and jumping and throwing against air, take all of that with a grain of salt.
Of course you don’t want players who are too slow for certain positions. I remember a GM telling me that his cutoff for the 40 time at cornerback was 4.55. Anything slower, he probably wouldn’t pick the kid.
But if you’re a Jets fans, you can only hope that the New York Post feels that way about Winston and Mariota, but not Mike Maccagan.
If Winston and Marieta “wowed the Jets,” by their combine work, then Woody Johnson picked the wrong GM.
Which I don’t think they did.
Maccagan has been scouting for 20 years.
He knows better than to be wowed by this stuff.
February 23, 2015
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