Happy Sunday. It’s been a quieter week at SportsBall HQ as we’ve been coming down from the Olympics push. A couple of hand massages later, it finally feels like we’re back on the horse.
Projects we did this week 📅
Spotlight Project: NFL Combine 🏈
As many sports fans know, we’re in a bit of a quiet spell right now. The Olympics have wrapped up, and we’re sitting in that awkward gap before baseball, March Madness, or the NHL and NBA playoffs ramp up.
So this felt like the perfect time to dig into one of those under-the-radar annual events that quietly generates a mountain of data: the NFL Combine.
For the uninitiated, think of the Combine as the world’s most intense job interview, except instead of being asked where you see yourself in five years, you’re running sprints in front of thirty NFL scouts. College players trying to make the NFL are put through a battery of physical and mental tests, and the results can make or break where, and whether, they get drafted.
The project plan was to scour 20+ years of data going back to 2000, hunting for superlatives: who’s the fastest, who’s the strongest, how do performances stack up across generations? A clean narrative, nice and simple. But the numbers had other ideas.
Attached in this link is a google sheet with all the combine data going back to 2000 if you want to look at the numbers yourself
What I started to notice were significant participation gaps in recent years. The 40-yard dash still pulls enormous numbers, but something like the 225-pound bench press? Sometimes only a fraction of players bother to record a result. Rather than the performance story I’d planned, the more interesting tale turned out to be about participation itself.
Players have become increasingly strategic about which drills they take part in. With limited upside, real injury risk, and the very real threat that one bad rep could tank your draft stock, many prospects are simply opting out of anything that isn’t essential. The Combine has quietly split into two tiers: a core trio of the 40-yard dash, vertical jump, and broad jump that almost everyone still does, and a second tier of agility drills and strength tests that a growing number of players are skipping entirely.
Which raises a bigger question: what is the Combine actually for anymore?
NFL teams already have years of game film, GPS tracking, and performance data, often going back to high school. Because of that, the Combine has shifted away from being purely about physical testing and toward face-to-face evaluation. It’s closer to a speed dating event for decision makers, where teams sit across from prospects, look them in the eye, ask questions, review full medical imaging, and decide whether they’re comfortable with the person behind the player.
In the end, that’s what made this the most rewarding data dive in a while. I came in looking for the fastest and the strongest and left with something far more interesting: a story about how one of sport’s most famous testing grounds is quietly reinventing itself, one opt-out at a time.
Projects coming soon 🔜
Working on a lot of different stuff at the moment, especially as we transition between seasons. In no particular order, or promises on timing:
⚾️ World Baseball Classic explainer
⚽️ Champions League explainer
🏉 Rugby explainer
🏀 March Madness previews
🏀 MJ rookie card breakdown
Hope everyone has a great week, and as always, feel free to respond with any feedback. We’re all ears.
More drawings soon.
— Riley & Claire
