Every February, as we rise out of our Super Bowl hangovers, the scouting combine comes along to re-focus our heads into the upcoming league year, draft, and actual season. Here are 20 things we learned this time around,
Free agency could be a whole new ballgame.
Based on the feeling in Indianapolis last week, there are two pendulums that hang over the new league year, which begins March 18: A free-agent quarterback situation the likes of which we’ve never seen before (more on that in a minute), and the status of a new Collective Bargaining Agreement. A group of owners and player representatives from all 32 teams met in Indy last Tuesday, with a 17-14 player rep vote with one abstention taking the proposal to the entire player pool for a ratification vote once a few things are ironed out.
If that goes through, we’re close to labor peace until the end of the decade. The owners are offering a bigger piece of the pie of all broadcast revenue, which should increase drastically with new television deals. Some players are balking at a 17-game season, which the owners seem to see as an inflexible bargaining chip. If there is no agreement, there could be a lockout in 2021 following the expiration of the current CBA. At this point, owners don’t know what the salary cap will be long-term without an agreement. Could this lead to a depressed market in free agency? We will have to wait and see.
A whole lot of veteran quarterbacks are on the bubble.
Philip Rivers will be on the move after 16 seasons with the Chargers. Tom Brady could very well be on the move after 20 years with the Patriots. Dak Prescott, Jameis Winston, Ryan Tannehill, and Teddy Bridgewater are among the quarterbacks set to be free agents if they’re not either signed or tagged by their current teams. And in some cases, quarterbacks who are signed to contracts don’t seem to have the full support of their current franchises.
For the Raiders, who are moving to Las Vegas this season, I was told that while most operations are still based in Oakland for the time being, change could be coming — and not just geographically. Rumors started late last season about a “significant disconnect” between head coach Jon Gruden and Derek Carr, and Gruden has been known to be brutally exacting with his quarterbacks. Gruden has said nothing to assure Carr of anything, despite a season in which Carr moved over the 100 mark in passer rating for the first time in his career.
Gruden didn’t speak at the combine, but general manager Mike Mayock did, and his thoughts on Carr seemed to waver.
“I’m surprised it took two questions to get to Derek, but thank you. The bottom line is this. Everybody needs to understand at what level Derek Carr played last year, okay? The guy completed 70% of his passes, he had almost a 3-to-1 touchdown-to-interception ratio. I think we were No. 11 in the league in total yards, we were seventh in third down conversions. We did a lot of really good things on offense last year. The disconnect was, we didn’t score a lot of points. You’re 11th in yards, and 24th in points, there’s an issue. It’s defense, it’s special teams, it’s not scoring in the red zone, and it’s not scoring in goal-to-goal. To me, those are the issues. Derek Carr played at a high level. I’m very happy with Derek Carr. What I’ve told everybody I’ve been in touch with since the day I took this job, we’re going to evaluate every position, every year. And if we can get better, we will. I know you guys get tired of me saying that, but that’s really what I told [Raiders owner] Mark Davis before I took the job. That’s really my mantra.”
Not a yes, not a no. Mayock did follow up with “We have a quarterback who runs Jon’s offense at a very high level,” but given Gruden’s historical dissatisfaction with the quarterback he has, and interest in just about every other quarterback, nothing here is guaranteed for Carr. The six-year veteran has a contract that runs through the 2022 season, with a $21.5 million cap hit if he’s on the roster, and a cap savings of $13.6 million if he isn’t.
Meanwhile, Giants GM Dave Gettleman said of 2019 rookie Daniel Jones, “I view Daniel Jones as going into his second year and learning how to be an NFL quarterback.”
Bears head coach Matt Nagy, fresh off bringing in a ton of new coaches to try and bring Mitchell Trubisky to a league-average level, seemed to blame himself for Trubisky’s faults more than anything else. We’ll see how long that lasts. Perhaps not until May, when the Bears have to decide whether to pull the trigger on Trubisky’s fifth-year option. You’re also going to hear a lot of talk about Chicago trading for a veteran quarterback like Andy Dalton.
And new Panthers head coach Matt Rhule has said that he can’t wait to work with Cam Newton, but that could easily be complicated by Newton’s injury history.
The moral of the story? Unless your team’s quarterback is a young, ascending superstar with years of contract in front of him, don’t get too comfortable with the way things are.
Dwayne Haskins could find himself as the next Josh Rosen.
After a rookie campaign in which he completed 58.6% of his passes for 1,365 yards, seven touchdowns, and seven interceptions, frequently looking lost when it came to progression reads and defensive recognition, Redskins quarterback Dwayne Haskins now has to impress upon a new coaching staff, led by Ron Rivera, that he is The Guy. Meanwhile, somebody from the Redskins (though it apparently wasn’t Rivera, who was at league meetings) met with Alabama quarterback Tua Tagovailoa to discuss how it might work if Washington took Tagovailoa with the second overall pick, or tried to trade down and still get him.
“They felt like Dwayne was not the guy right now,” one source told Safid Deen of the South Florida Sun-Sentinel, which seemed to back up overall thoughts during the week in Indianapolis. “They want to bring in Tua, just get it going and compete.”
Well… if you’re going to select a quarterback that high a year after you took another quarterback in the first round, that looks a lot more like you’re booting Haskins out of town, as opposed to fostering a competition. Which would put Haskins in the same boat as former Cardinals quarterback Josh Rosen, selected with the 10th overall pick in the 2018 draft, and subsequently traded to Miami when the Cardinals took Oklahoma’s Kyler Murray first overall in 2019. Or, it could be the soap opera the Redskins had with Robert Griffin III and Kirk Cousins a few years back. Fun!
Rivera said all the right things about Haskins’ future during his media session, but this is one to watch. Allotting superstar pass-rusher Chase Young to the Redskins in your next mock draft might not be the slam-dunk you thought it was.
Moving the drills to prime time was a bit weird.
This was the year that the NFL decided to move the combine’s positional drills to prime time, and while there wasn’t a graphic dip in performance, nobody seemed incredibly happy about the switch.
As Joel A. Erickson of Indystar.com reported, the aforementioned Jeff Foster, who runs the National Invitational Camp (combine) staff and a Combine Working Group of five general managers, including the Colts’ Chris Ballard, have spent the past six months working on the new timing.
Foster, for one, would have preferred a more gradual rollout.
“I will tell you that strategically, I never would have implemented this much change in any one year, simply because of the potential domino effect it can have on the logistics involved in the event,” Foster said. “With regard to that, it’s been an incredible challenge.”
Per Bleacher Report’s Matt Miller, agents are not happy about the lags in engagement and the longer days that they believe could make their players more susceptible to injury.
“If [the NFL] is going to make guys stand around and wait for hours to workout, ours will bow out next year,” one agent told Miller. “We’re not risking hamstrings, ACLs and Achilles’ for TV money we don’t see a part of.”
One trainer said that soft tissue injuries could be on the rise with the new time slot, and the general belief is that the NFL will solve any complaints about a prime time combine by moving the whole thing three hours back from Indianapolis to Los Angeles. And the monetization of the combine has prospect agents wondering anew: Why aren’t our players compensated for their participation? As usual, the league us caught between saying over and over that it cares about player safety and value, and enacting things that seem to go the other way.
The new combine drills got a mixed reception.
In an effort to have the combine’s on-field efforts more closely replicate what happens on NFL playing fields, the league rolled out a number of new combine drills this year, taking others away. And the NFL’s ready-fire-aim pace was pretty apparent here.
“First, we want to make sure the drills are reflective of today’s game,” said Jeff Foster, president of the National Invitation Camp, which runs the combine. “We’ve been using the same drills for many, many years, which is great to use as comparative analysis. But we also wanted to make sure we were updating the drills to reflect how the game has changed. The second piece was to add some elements to it that would be more attractive to the players and the fans.”
Well, not so much. Georgia quarterback Jake Fromm told me last Tuesday that he only had a couple of days to prepare for new the fade drill; prospects weren’t really able to vet this. And there are agents who will undoubtedly hold their top players out with this as one reason. And the fade drill itself was kind of a mess as a result. There are college programs in which quarterbacks have never thrown fades, and subsequently, receivers have never caught them.
And the new hoop drill, in which defensive linemen have to run hoops, picking up towels and putting them back down, ran afoul of former NFL defensive end Stephen White, who played for the Buccaneers from 1996 through 2001, and for the Saints in 2002.
So… maybe another year to work out all the wrinkles.
Every QB beyond Burrow and Tua have serious issues to work out.
The two quarterbacks with little to prove on the field didn’t throw during the combine drills, which is the way it usually happens. Joe Burrow didn’t throw because he just threw 60 touchdown passes in LSU’s national championship season, and Tua Tagovailoa is still recovering from a hip injury, though all the news is good regarding his recovery.
Burrow and Tua make up the top shelf of this year’s quarterback class. After that, teams are going to be taking signal-callers with exciting upsides, but potentially fatal flaws.
- Oklahoma’s Jalen Hurts wowed during his combine drills, showing a great arm and improved footwork, but there are still a lot of uncertainties when it comes to his ability to succeed in a timing-and-rhythm offense at the next level.
- Oregon’s Justin Herbert looked good when he let it go on the deep throws, but there are legitimate questions about his consistency, progression reads, history of fumbles, and inaccuracies on short and medium passes.
- Utah State’s Jordan Love wows at times with his deep ball and athleticism, but he pressed his way into 17 interceptions last season, his lower-body mechanics remain a work in progress, and he can be eliminated as a thrower by consistent pressure.
- Washington’s Jacob Eason also has trouble throwing under pressure, and while he looked great on the deep-throw drills, he’s a serious project when it comes to timing and anticipation throws.
- Georgia’s Jake Fromm? Well, everybody says the same thing, because it’s true. Fromm is probably the best quarterback in this class above the neck, but he limits your offense with his inability to generate the easy velocity required for deep throws.
This is a somewhat deep quarterback class, but hardly historic. A lot of guys will be sitting for at least their first NFL seasons if they are to ultimately succeed.
This is a great year to need an offensive tackle.
If you want a historic draft class, move to the offensive linemen and receivers — the defensive backs class is also sneaky good. But the offensive linemen, especially the left tackles? You’d have to go a long way to find someone in the NFL who isn’t giddy about this class, and it wouldn’t be out of the question for four or five of these guys to land in the top 12. Last year, an offensive lineman wasn’t taken until Alabama guard Jonah Williams with the 11th overall pick, and a tackle wasn’t taken until the Eagles took Washington State’s Andre Dillard at 22.
Start with two guys who were absolute athletic freaks during their combine workouts. Louisville’s Mekhi Becton ran a 5.11-second 40-yard dash with a 1.77-second 10-yard split (which you’re more likely to see from edge rushers and tight ends). This wasn’t just a yoked-up big guy amped for a quick run, either — Becton looked as agile in the position drills as he had on the field for the Cardinals, and he’ll take that to the NFL.
This is an even better year to need a receiver.
Through the 2020 draft process, you’ll hear over and over that the receiver class is one of the best anyone’s seen in years. Populated by Alabama standouts Jerry Jeudy and Henry Ruggs III, as well as Oklahoma’s CeeDee Lamb, Colorado’s Leviska Shenault, and Clemson’s Tee Higgins at the top, this class also has a ton of interesting lesser-known targets for quarterbacks.
Baylor’s Denzel Mims will have a lot of people talking about him as a late first- or early second-round pick after an explosive combine. Mims ran a 4.38 40-yard dash at 6-foot-3 and 207 pounds and looked great when asked to catch the ball. LSU’s Justin Jefferson may have been even more impressive in the receiver drills, And Notre Dame WR/TE Chase Claypool may have been the star of the group when it comes to prospects in this class moving up boards.
Claypool measured at 6 feet 4 and 238 pounds, with a 9 7/8-inch hand size, 32 4/8-inch arm length and an 80-inch wingspan. Claypool’s body type has a lot of NFL people thinking of moving him to a “Y” tight end, removed from the formation in a Travis Kelce style.
“I really haven’t put a lot of thought into that, because I’ve been a receiver this whole time,” Claypool said this week. “But it’s something that I think could add versatility to my game. Right now, I’m just focused on being the best receiver I can be.”
Well, it worked out on the field at Lucas Oil Stadium, as Claypool ran a 4.42 40-yard dash and put together a 40.5-inch vertical jump and a 126-inch broad jump.
No matter what you’re looking for at the position, you can find it this season.
Teams are looking for positionless players more than ever.
I spoke with several NFL head coaches and general managers last week about the increasing number of NCAA defensive players who played more than 100 snaps at three or more different positions last season, and how that aligns with a new NFL mindset which appreciates versatility more than ever. Vikings head coach Mike Zimmer may have had the most technically interesting response.
“The league has basically turned into a single-high [safety] league,” Zimmer said. “Everybody is there, putting safeties down in the box or using safeties as linebackers. The way the game is widened out and gotten more space, you’re going to find smaller, faster linebackers or safeties that can take those guys places. Or guys like the guys you mentioned that really can play in the back end, but they do a lot of damage at the line of scrimmage with blitzing and pressure.”
I focused on three such players in the aforementioned article — Alabama’s Xavier McKinney, LSU’s Grant Delpit, and Clemson’s Isaiah Simmons. Of the three, Simmons became certainly the belle of the ball — and perhaps the star of the entire combine — when he ran a 4.39 40-yard dash at 6-foot-4 and 238 pounds. And then, he did a bunch of other stuff to just wreck the combine entirely.
As the NFL Network pointed out, Simmons’ 40 was faster than the dashes run by these Clemson receivers: Martavis Bryant (4.42 in 2014), Sammy Watkins (4.43 in 2014), and DeAndre Hopkins (4.57 in 2013). That’s just freaky.
Expect McKinney, Delpit, and most certainly Simmons to go fairly early in the first round, with Simmons looking more and more like a top-five lock. And expect the trend of the the positionless defensive player to continue in the NFL.
We need to start talking about Antoine Winfield Jr.
If Zimmer is right, and the NFL has become a single-high league (which he is and which it has for the most part), that puts an increased emphasis on the value of the true deep third safety who can roam from side to side, blitz from anywhere, handle run fits when the situation requires, and essentially bait and trap quarterbacks as a cornerback would. Delpit is an interesting version of such a player, but my eye has been on Minnesota’s Antoine Winfield Jr. for a while now.
Winfield, the son of the longtime Bills and Vikings cornerback, played in just eight games combined in 2017 and 2018 with various injuries, but came back with authority in 2019 by picking off seven passes for the Golden Gophers. Winfield’s injury history had some people wondering about his NFL future at one time, but as I discovered when I recently watched tape with him, there is no afterburn whatsoever with his previous maladies.
Moreover, Winfield, who ran a 4.45 40-yard dash at the combine and killed it in the drills, plays even faster than he runs because he’s so astute with on-field reads. Some may still doubt that a 5-foot-9 guy can play safety in the NFL, but Winfield’s measurements stack up pretty well with Earl Thomas’ when Thomas came out of Texas in 2010. Not that I’m yet comparing Winfield to Thomas, the best coverage safety of his generation, but between the speed, the acumen, and the attitude, there’s a lot to like here. Perhaps enough to make Winfield a first-round pick.
If you come at Jeffrey Okudah, you’d best not miss.
Ohio State cornerback Jeffrey Okudah won’t likely last past the third or fourth pick, which is what happens when you’re absolutely the best boundary cornerback in this draft class. That didn’t stop one poor reporter from getting floored by Okudah when he presented an inaccurate scouting report during Okudah’s media session.
“Sometimes, you have a tendency to get kind of sloppy,” the reporter asked. “How are you looking to improve that?”
“Sloppy in what way?” Okudah responded.
“Sloppy in kind of … penalties and stuff like that,” the reporter said.
“I had zero pass interferences, zero holdings,” Okudah concluded. “Put the tape on again; you might see something else.”
Just so we’re clear, the tape shows this.
Okudah also ran a 4.48 40-yard dash at 6-foot-1 and 205 pounds, and impressed even further when he really wanted to continue his field drills after hitting his head on the turf. It was smart to shut it down, though Okudah later gave a positive status via Twitter:
On the field and at the podium, Okudah maintained the alpha dog mentality that is a requirement at his position.
Every combine has amazing personal stories.
While we’re all focused on what the prospects say and do at the combine, it’s often the background stories that fascinate. NFL.com’s Kimberly Jones told the story of Penn State edge-rusher Yetur Gross-Matos, whose father died in a drowning accident while trying to save two-year-old Yetur. Nine years later, Gross-Matos’ brother Chelal was killed when he was struck by a bolt of lightning while playing baseball with his brother.
“You’ll never get an explanation,” Yetur told Jones. “There are a bunch of kids, bunch of adults, and two kids playing catch and one ends up getting struck by lightning. And nobody else. One of them survived. One didn’t. When I was younger, it just made me angry. But the situation is the situation, you try to make the best of it.”
Then, there’s Tennessee linebacker Daniel Bituli. Born in the Congo, Bituli and his family had to leave the country when he was 1 ½ years old, because his mother’s life was in danger in a politically fractious environment. The family was relocated to a refugee camp in Cameroon before eventually landing in Nashville when Bituli was 3 years old. He eventually became a star player at Nashville Christian High School, helping the Eagles win their first state title in 2015 before heading off to college.
“This definitely means a lot to me,” he said during the week in Indianapolis. “I’m just trying to be a good role model to kids who are looking up to me right now… I definitely don’t take this position lightly.”
Some players’ combine numbers will have you looking harder at their games.
From Jalen Hurts to Denzel Mims to Mekhi Becton and about 100 other guys, combine testing on the plus side will have you going back to look and see if those athletic attributes transfer to the game tape. Sometimes they do; often they don’t. But this is when you cross-check and see if, for example, Utah receiver Javelin Guidry can be more than the speed guy he showed with a 4.29 40-yard dash. Or, whether Florida defensive lineman Jabari Zuniga’s 4.64 40-yard dash at 6-foot-3 and 264 pounds has you looking differently at the flashes he showed at times.
Some players make you ignore the drills and go back to the tape.
Auburn defensive tackle Derrick Brown had the lowest three-cone time of any interior defensive lineman at this year’s combine at 8.22. His 5.16 40-yard dash was the fourth-lowest for the position. His broad jump of 108 inches was sixth-worst. And on and on. Then, you watch Brown on the field looking like some unholy combination of Ndamukong Suh and Gerald McCoy as he demolishes offensive lineman after offensive lineman, and those numbers become far less relevant. If teams in the top 10 of the draft order want to overcook those results, some team in the next few picks will happily find itself with a Pro Bowl-potential player falling into its collective lap.
Iowa pass-rusher A.J. Epenesa didn’t test well with a 5.04 40-yard dash, 17 bench-press reps, and a 7.34 three-cone time, but listen to his former teammate, Iowa offensive tackle Tristan Wirfs, who blew up the combine with his own drills, via Mike Tanier of Bleacher Report:
“We had some battles. When I met with the Broncos, they said a scout was there [at Iowa practice] and I didn’t lose to A.J. So I said, ‘I’m glad you were there on that day.’ It goes back and forth, me and him. He was one of my best friends on the team. We will try to help each other get better. If he sees something that he beat me on, he’ll tell me what he saw. And when I beat him, I tell him what I saw.”
So, sometimes, it’s best to take the drills with a grain of salt and trust what you saw on the tape. At 6-foot-5 and 275 pounds, Epenesa projects very well based on his on-field exploits as a fluid mover with excellent hands. He’s also able to kick inside, and he’ll add to any hybrid front in the NFL.
Sometimes, the drills don’t matter as much as prospects would like them to.
Conversely, North Carolina State defensive lineman James Smith-Williams ran a 4.6 40-yard dash at 6-foot-4 and 265 pounds. That led all of the big men. Add in 28 reps on the bench press, a 123-inch broad jump, and a 7.35-second three-cone time, and you might think of Smith-Williams as one of the combine risers we hear about every year.
Sadly, Smith-Williams’ injury history, which limited him to just 29 games over five seasons, is going to get in the way. If Smith-Williams is able to transcend that at the NFL level, it may have to be as a late third-day pick or undrafted free agent. Smith-Williams did have six sacks and nine tackles for loss in 2018, his one relatively healthy season.
“He can’t stay on the field,” one NFC scout said to NFLcom’s Lance Zierlein regarding Smith-Williams. “There is no way we draft a guy like that. If we like a player with his injury history, we’ll target him as a free agent, but that’s it.”
Some players simply are who we thought they were.
As a Seattle resident, I watched a lot of Washington quarterback Jacob Eason through his 2019 season with the Huskies, which is where he wound up after leaving Georgia in Jake Fromm’s wake. Eason completed 64.2% of his passes last season for 3,132 yards, 7.7 yards per attempt, 23 touchdowns, and eight interceptions for his second collegiate team. He is a tough evaluation on tape because, for every big-time throw you see that makes you think he’s NFL-ready, there are two throws that are either erratic from a clean pocket, or an implosion under pressure (a large issue in his case) that have you thinking “career backup.”
During his combine drills, Eason played to type. He looked good on the deep throws, and highly questionable on angular routes requiring timing and rhythm. Fromm was much better on those types of throws, despite his relatively unimpressive arm.
Teams will look at this, and Eason’s worrisome efficiency splits under pressure (a 78.1 passer rating as opposed to a 109.7 rating with a clean pocket, per Sports Info Solutions), and they may wonder exactly what they’re getting. That’s been my experience when watching Eason’s tape.
Small-school prospects can see their lives change forever.
For small-school players like Lenoir-Rhyne “safetybacker” Kyle Dugger or Southern Illinois safety Jeremy Chinn, the process that starts with postseason weeks at the East-West Shrine Game and the Senior Bowl bloom into opportunities to show every NFL personnel person that a small school doesn’t always indicate a small talent. The word was already out on Dugger from a good Senior Bowl week, and he didn’t disappoint in Indy. Neither did Chinn.
Of course, then, you have to go back to the tape (which is the mantra through this entire thing) and see if you can project these players in a “like-as-like” scenario, or if you’re simply dealing with big fishes in small ponds. Sometimes, there’s more to be seen, and that’s one of the true values of the combine — putting these players out front where they belong.
Marlon Davidson had the quote of the combine.
Davidson, who played both inside and outside on Auburn’s defensive line and came back in 2019 to live up to a promise to his late mother that he would earn his degree, put up 14.5 sacks and 28 tackles for loss in four years with the Tigers. He’s an interesting tweener speed/power prospect who ran a 5.04 40-yard dash at 6-foot-3 and 303 pounds. But it was what he said about what he does that had people talking (in a funny way) last week.
Davidson was playing to the crowd a bit, but you can also imagine more than a few NFL personnel people being pretty happy about that general attitude.
The combine might not be in Indianapolis much longer.
As we pointed out earlier, there’s no guarantee that the combine will be in Indianapolis much longer. The league will likely take this show on the road soon, as it has for the draft, to reward franchises for building new stadiums and to make the thing even more of a spectacle than it already is. Los Angeles seems like a staple location. As a veteran of 14 combines from the media perspective, I can only say that it’s a mistake. Indy is an eminently walkable city, Lucas Oil Stadium is a great facility, trusted medical centers are nearby, and one of the reasons the combine was moved here from warm-weather locations back in the day (Tampa, New Orleans, and Arizona in the 1980s) was to ensure that coaches and general managers wouldn’t go off and play golf. Not that any of the NFL’s modern coaches and GMs would do this, but having the combine in Indianapolis is a true case of, “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.”
Rich Eisen’s 40-yard dash was the most important of the combine.
At the end of every scouting combine since 2005, Eisen, the NFL Network host who chairs the network’s combine coverage, walks down to the field at Lucas Oil Stadium and runs a 40-yard dash to benefit St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital. This year, through donations, Eisen has raised over $800,000 in 2020, and every year, it’s a bigger deal. It’s a nice reminder that, as much as we’re all about football at this concentrated time, there are ways to reach out and give back.
Touchdown Wire editor Doug Farrar previously covered football for Yahoo! Sports, Sports Illustrated, Bleacher Report, the Washington Post, and Football Outsiders. His first book, “The Genius of Desperation,” a schematic history of professional football, was published by Triumph Books in 2018 and won the Professional Football Researchers Association’s Nelson Ross Award for “Outstanding recent achievement in pro football research and historiography.”
