National Football League

Seahawks offseason: NFL Combine is up next

Updated Mar. 4, 2020 10:07 p.m. ET

Fansided, Keith Myers/FanSided via 12th Man Rising

The Seattle Seahawks offseason is now in full swing. The first stop for the team as they prepare for next season is the NFL Combine.

The Super Bowl is behind us, and now the entire league has moved on to the 2017 season. The first order of business in this Seattle Seahawks offseason will be the NFL Combine.

It wasn’t long ago that the NFL combine was considered to be completely useless by many draft pundits. Al Davis and Jerry Jones famously wasted too many draft picks selecting fast 40 times over players with actual football talent, and the combine fell out of favor.

That changed recently due to the work of writers like Zach Whitman of 3SigmaAthlete. Zach focussed on the entire athletic profile, and not just straight-line speed. By reverse engineering Nike’s SPARQ formula, Zach was able to predict NFL success quite effectively.

Zach’s work has brought the NFL combine back into focus for draft analysts. The 40-yard dash is still mostly worthless, but the rest of the drills provide effective context for which to judge a player’s athleticism.

Even with that in mind, we should all keep in mind that the drills are only a small part of the NFL Combine. The most important facets of the event are the pieces we don’t get to see.

Besides running around doing the underwear olympics, players also speak with representatives of as many teams as possible. Players get a chance to show off their football knowledge as they try and impress NFL teams.

These interviews also give players with red flags in their background a chance to address them. You might recall that Bruce Irvin was graded down by pundits because of arrests when he was younger. This arrests turned out to be nothing after Irvin was able to discuss them with NFL teams. Pundits didn’t learn that part until after the draft.

The other portion of the combine that we don’t get access to are the medical evaluations. Players get poked and prodded by any team that that wants their doctors to poke and prod them. Some players will undergo medical evaluations by all 32 teams.

If you don’t like to watch the event on TV, well you’re not alone. As important as it is for NFL teams, most of the television coverage of the combine is completely unwatchable.