Athletic Profiles

Field guide

How to read an athletic profile

A raw combine number on its own tells you almost nothing. Four and a half seconds in the forty-yard dash is unremarkable for a wide receiver and genuinely rare for a tight end who weighs fifty pounds more. The measurement only becomes information once you know who it is being compared against, which is why every number on this page is expressed as a percentile within the player's own position group rather than against the field as a whole.

A percentile of 90 means the player tested better than ninety per cent of the players at his position who have recorded that drill since 2000. A percentile of 50 is the middle of his position. The comparison never crosses position lines, and there is deliberately no combined view: a percentile computed among quarterbacks and one computed among running backs are two different measurements that happen to share a scale, and stacking them in one table would rank numbers that do not mean the same thing.

The drills, and what each one is actually measuring

The forty-yard dash is the famous one, and it is really two tests in one: the first ten yards measure how quickly a player can get moving from a dead stop, and the back half measures top speed. It matters most for players whose job involves running past somebody, which is why it dominates conversation about receivers and far less about interior linemen.

The vertical jump and the broad jump are both explosion tests, but in different directions. The vertical is the cleaner measure of lower-body power off a standing start, and it is the one people reach for when arguing about a receiver's ability to win a contested catch. The broad jump asks for that same power directed horizontally, and it tends to correlate with how well a player can change speed rather than simply reach a high one.

The three-cone drill and the twenty-yard shuttle are the agility tests, and they are the two that separate players who look fast in a straight line from players who are difficult to cover. Both require decelerating, changing direction and accelerating again. A receiver who runs a mediocre forty but posts an excellent three-cone is usually the sort who gets open on short routes rather than deep ones.

The bench press counts repetitions at 225 pounds. It is the least predictive drill on this page for the skill positions and it is included mainly for completeness. Quarterbacks are not shown a bench press figure at all, because barely any of them perform the lift at the combine and an axis that is empty for almost everyone is a hole in the chart rather than a measurement.

Why height is shown but never ranked

Height appears on individual player pages as a plain figure and carries no percentile anywhere on this site. That is a deliberate limitation rather than an oversight. Our source records height only to the whole inch, and once heights are rounded that way a position ends up with as few as nine distinct values. At tight end, a single inch is worth as much as twenty-seven percentile points, and nearly a third of the position shares one value. A player measured at six foot three and five-eighths gets rounded up to six foot four and would appear substantially taller relative to his peers than he actually is. A ranking that can be wrong by that margin is worse than no ranking, so we show the measurement and decline to rank it.

What this data cannot tell you

Testing numbers describe what a player did in shorts on one particular day, usually years ago and before he had played a professional snap. They are a genuine input into how a player is likely to hold up and what kind of role suits him, and they are completely useless as a substitute for watching what he has actually done since. Plenty of excellent players tested poorly, and every draft class contains someone who tested superbly and never produced.

Coverage is also uneven, and the page does not pretend otherwise. Players skip drills for all sorts of reasons: an injury going into the combine, a decision to run only at a pro day, or simply a choice not to attempt a drill that will not flatter them. Where a measurement was never taken we leave it out and say so rather than filling the gap with a zero, because a spoke pulled to the middle of a chart reads as a terrible result instead of an absent one. Some players have all seven measurements and some have two. A player with fewer than three gets his numbers listed without a chart, because three points is the minimum that makes a shape rather than a line.

Finally, the figures here come from combine results as recorded by our data source, which does not distinguish between a time run at the combine itself and one recorded at a pro day. Occasionally the two disagree, and where they do this page reports what the source says rather than substituting a number we cannot cite.