The NFL season is year-round, even if the games only last for five months.
Case in point: the Combine begins today, just two weeks after the Super Bowl. Draft hopefuls, start your engines.
One of those prospects, of course, is Toby Gerhart, and there will be few players with more at stake in Indianapolis than him.
A refresher course: the Combine is a scouting catch-all, where all of the top seniors and declared underclassmen descend on Lucas Oil Stadium for a few days of skills workouts, position drills, measurements and interviews. Players are quite literally dissected — tested for speed, agility, hops, strength, intelligence, decision-making and so on. It has become a massive media event in recent years, with NFL Network providing wall-to-wall coverage. With everyone on a level playing field, the relative comparisons are easy to make.
Some teams disregard much of the song and dance because it, for the most part, disregards what actually happens on the field. One NFL executive told Sports Illustrated’s Peter King that his draft board was 90 percent set because “guys go to the scouting Combine and they change their grade on a player based on things that have nothing to do with playing football. I’m convinced if you took the stopwatches away from a lot of these guys, most of ’em would not be able to tell you whether they liked a player or not.”
Which, for the most part, seems apt. We all go nuts when a player runs a mid-4.3 40-yard dash. Instantaneously, they seem to jump up the big boards, which is why unproven prospects like Darrius Heyward-Bey, for instance, wind up in the top 10 of April’s draft.
But there are exceptions to the rule, which brings us back to Gerhart. Everyone knew Heyward-Bey was fast; it was simply a matter of precisely quantifying it. But with Stanford’s star, no one seems to have much of a read on his speed, which has subsequently led to a giant question mark next to his draft status. He is projected anywhere from the second to the fifth round, with the ever-present caveat of “let’s see how he runs in Indy.”
The rest of his game is fairly well known. He’s a superior athlete with otherworldly intangibles. His patience and brute force are upper echelon, and his agility and lateral movement are impressive for a man his size. Watch five minutes of tape, and all of this is wildly apparent. But then there’s the speed issue. Because most of his runs were bruising takes that rarely allowed him to demonstrate his full motor, it’s hard to place him in a particular group — most assume he’s somewhere around a 4.6 back, but there’s no hard evidence, and just like his draft status, his projected time fluctuates between 4.4 and 4.7.
Gerhart ran below a 4.5 in high school and is rumored to have run a 4.43 at Stanford, both of which would be eye-opening times. A bruising back that runs in that range is a rare commodity. But those are certainly optimistic, and the Combine is known for humbling players who think they’re faster than they are.
With so much uncertain, the stakes are fairly high. Run slow, and Gerhart’s draft status will drop and his position will (wrongly) come into question — is he a fullback or a running back? Run quickly, and not only does the first round become a possibility, but any queries about the correct spot for him go out the window.
Of course, Gerhart has the benefit of most setting the bar fairly low, which means that even if he’s in the 4.5 range, he’ll be in good shape. Plus, given his style, he may not need all 40 yards — his initial burst in the first 10 yards is a decent indicator of how he’ll hit the hole at the next level.
He’s been training in Irvine, Calif. for the draft, particularly on his speed. He knows where he has to impress. While he has been coy about his current times, he has said publicly that he wants to “turn some heads” in Indianapolis.
Of course, speed is not the end all, and Gerhart could impress (or fail) in other drills as well — he has never trained full time for football, as he previously had to drop 15 pounds for baseball season. The full extent of what he can do when practicing around the clock is still unrealized for the general public. The three-cone, for instance, which measures agility in short bursts, could demonstrate his surprising shiftiness. And then, of course, there are the medical checkups, where he’ll have to grade out well to maintain his status — Yahoo’s Jason Cole reported yesterday that Gerhart has “lingering injuries” from his collegiate career.
It will be a busy weekend for Gerhart, but one in which a lot of questions will be answered. Still, the emphasis will be on his straight-line speed — there is perhaps no one drill that is more important to a single player.
Born to run or on a downbound train? Only Gerhart can provide the answer.
Wyndam Makowsky once tried to dissect football players in a biology class. Teach him how to properly use the word “literally” at [email protected].