NFL Combine: Final thoughts

The NFL Combine is officially over, and the event left us with a fairly clear picture about the overall quality of this draft class.

The importance of the NFL Combine is widely misunderstood. No player goes from being a 4th round pick to a first round pick just because of his 40-time, no matter how the media tries to frame it.

Instead, the importance of the event lies in the medical evaluations and the interviews. The athletic tests are about determining overall athleticism, and shouldn’t be examined individually.

With the event behind us, here some some general thoughts (All athletic testing comparisons come from Zach Whitman of 3 sigma athlete.):

From an athletic standpoint, this class of defensive backs is special. The top 4 athletes were all defensive back. There were six players that tested better than 95% of NFL players at their position.

There aren’t any CB that are have Richard Sherman’s length, but there rarely are. There are plenty of players at the position that are over 6 ft. with long arms. This year’s version of Jeremy Lane is out there, we just don’t know who it’ll be yet.

This is an awful year to need a TE. I know it seems that we say that every year, but this one is especially terrible.

Out of all the TEs at the combine, only four had SPARQ scores over the 50th percentile. Two of those were barely so (under 55th percentile), meaning they are only average athletes.

There were only two players were reasonably above average athletically. One played at Harvard, and the other played at Montana State.

Yep, it’s a bad year to need a TE.

The Seahawks will be looking to add a DT through the draft, and there are plenty of athletic candidates to choose from. The group is every bit as deep as we expected it to be before the combine.

Sheldon Rankins, a player commonly mocked to Seattle, had a tremendous workout. People are now talking about him as a top 15 draft pick. Looks like we need to find a new favorite prospect at the position.

Two names to keep an eye on for the annual defense-to-offense conversion projections are Boston College’s Connor Wajciak and Javon Hargrave from South Carolina State.

Both of them flashed incredible athleticism at the combine, but aren’t highly regarded prospect as defensive tackles. That is just the kind of player that Tom Cable loves to convert.