It’s that time of the year again. The flurry of league-wide movement that accompanies free agency has died down, and the football world has turned its attention to the NFL draft. 

NFL teams have a short five weeks to come up with a plan of attack for the most important weekend for the future of the league. After a draft one year ago that saw Green Bay taking the national spotlight, the Packers won’t even be around for night one, having traded their first round pick for Micah Parsons. We’ll have a long wait through Thursday and Friday before we meet the newest member of the Green Bay Packers. A year removed from an incredible job of physically hosting the event, and one of the best moments of that draft: the announcement of Matthew Golden’s selection to the hometown crowd. The resulting crowd pop was such a fun moment, and surely one of the Packers’ best draft moments in history. 

While the scouts, coaches, and front office personnel are hard at work figuring out who that newest Packer is going to be, I took the opportunity to review one of the biggest tools in Green Bay’s arsenal: their incredibly rigid athletic testing and body measurement thresholds. These thresholds are well known in the football world, and the thought process behind them has been written and discussed en masse. So today, I thought I would dig a little deeper into what those numbers actually mean to the people reviewing them. 

Let’s start on the body measurement side of things. There are generally four measurements taken here: height, weight, arm length and hand size. Some prospects also opt to have their total “wingspan” documented as well, though it’s much rarer than the first four. 

Height and weight are self explanatory. We’ve all had those measurements taken in school, or at the doctor’s office. Scouts use this information as a “quick glance” indicator of a couple of factors. For height, it can be a matter as simple as making sure a quarterback is tall enough to properly survey the field, and checking the requisite box. There is some subtlety hidden in this measurement though, especially when you consider that prospects can be too tall. Excessive height can be an injury risk, for example, if a player’s frame is too lean. It can also limit a player’s lateral agility, especially for positions like defensive back. 

Weight is, of course, extremely positionally dependent. What it will usually tell you is what subsection of a position that a prospect could fit into. Is an offensive lineman a power based mauler, or an agile blocker that can pull across formations and help out on screens effectively? At 187 lbs, Jayden Reed is at home as a primary slot receiver, but DK Metcalf, who is almost 40 lbs heavier, is probably more of an outside guy, right? 

Combining height and weight measurements can also give teams an idea of how “malleable” a prospect could be. Say there are two linebacker prospects who are both 230lbs, and the Packers want a heavier linebacker. Prospect A is two inches taller than prospect B, so there’s a little more “room” on his frame to add weight before you might have to worry about that extra weight affecting other areas of his game. It works the other way too. 

Measuring a player’s arm and hand size is all about determining how much of the space around them they can affect. When you get players who are in constant contact with each other like offensive and defensive linemen, their “reach” can be the difference between winning or losing a rep. Just like in boxing, reach isn’t the end all be all, as you still need to win with fundamentals, power, and technique. Getting to make contact a bit before your opponent does sure helps though. For receivers and defensive backs, you also love to see the large “catch radius” that a long arm length can indicate. 

Hand size is, to me, a pretty underrated aspect of scouting. For any player that touches the ball consistently, bigger hands means you control more of the ball when holding it. It’s really just that simple. It makes it harder to knock the ball out of your hands, it means you’ll have an easier time catching the ball, and quarterbacks get just a little bit of extra control. Bigger, more powerful hands can make a player’s life easier on the line of scrimmage as well, considering you’ve got a little more power to hold or break an opponent's grip when blocking. 

Now, we get to the fun stuff. Or is it the tedious stuff? It probably depends on who you’re asking. It’s the athletic testing side of things. 

These drills are generally understood to be split up into three areas. There is the vertical and broad jump, which measure “explosion”, the 40 yard dash and its component 10/20 yard split times which measure straight line speed, and the shuttle / 3 cone drills which measure agility. 

Personally, I’ve got a love/hate relationship with the concept of athletic testing as a major tool of NFL scouting. I think there is some quality data points that you can gather from these numbers, one big concept it provides, but also tons of factors that make those drills near useless. 

The one big concept that these drills provide is crosschecking. When watching a player’s film, you get a general idea of their game speed, agility and strength. That is, the actual athletic traits that they utilize when playing the game with pads on. For example, take Matthew Golden. At the combine, Golden ran a blazing fast 4.29 40 yard dash, the fastest among all wide receivers and second fastest overall at his combine. But, one of the main talking points surrounding Golden was that he didn’t actually play at that speed. So armed with this new information, it might behoove scouts to go back to the film and figure out why Golden did not play at that speed. Was he asked to play a role that kept him from unleashing his full speed, like lots of underneath / screen routes? Was it the quarterback’s fault? If you asked him to do something different at the NFL level, could he show that speed off? Or, was that number just a result of hyper-specific training before the combine? 

Regarding Golden’s 40 yard dash time, we can dig deeper and find some more concrete meaning within it. This is why the scouting world also measures the 10 and 20 yard split times of that 40 yard dash. Can the player explode out of his stance for an impressive 10 yard split? Scouts can use this information to assess a player's release out of their beginning stance, a trait which applies to every position. How quickly can that player get to their top speed? That’s where the 20 yard split comes into play, and the final time should be an indicator of whether a player can maintain that speed through the rep (though that final number is unfortunately the one that usually gets wrapped up in a nice bow, presented as a final indicator of a player’s speed). For Golden’s part, his splits were elite, with a 1.47 10 yard split (99th percentile) and 2.49 20 yard split (98th percentile). His final time of 4.29 was a 99th percentile. His 10 yard to 20 yard split percentile drop (of one percent) is barely noticeable, but you can see how a more noticeable drop could result in some questions. 

The ten yard split is often compared alongside the broad and vertical jump as “explosion scores”. Obviously football players don’t get a lot of chances to do much jumping on the football field, but those scores can tell you a lot about the “quick twitch” muscles that are essential for practical speed and strength on the gridiron. 

Lastly, we have the agility drills, the shuttle cone and the three cone drill. Both drills are indicative of a player’s ability to maintain balance and speed while changing direction. The main difference between the two is that the shuttle is a lateral, side to side drill, while the three cones are done in an “L” shape, with a cone marking every point in the letter. 

Obviously, we aren’t privy to the real numbers that the Packers front office uses to evaluate players, but thanks to the intensive research of Packers fans, we have a pretty good idea for a couple of positions. For example, we know that the Packers love offensive linemen who have a sub 4.75 shuttle time and sub 7.75 3-cone, while generally falling under 6 '6. For cornerbacks, you want to watch for players who are larger than 5 '11 and 190lbs, while scoring sub 4.6 40 times and a sub 7.00 3-cone. So on and so forth. 

How important these drills are largely lie in the eye of the beholder, but as Packers fans it is important for us to remember that these drills are really important to the Packers. We obviously can’t influence who Green Bay will choose when the draft rolls around, but isn’t it fun to be informed on who the Packers might draft, and why? I love narrowing down the list of suspects, an endeavor that is exceedingly difficult without a first round pick. It’s a lot easier to narrow down the twentieth pick than the fifty second, but we’ll be there nonetheless. And remember, if you get too bummed out about the lack of first round selection, just spend the night watching Micah Parsons highlights. You (and the Packers) will be fine.