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Earlier today, we looked at the college production of 24 draft-eligible linebackers. Now we're going to check out their athletic markers and see which prospects emerge as the most productive AND most athletic.
Of the roughly 300,000 high school seniors playing organized football, only 0.1% (or one in a thousand) make the NFL.
A recent NCAA study shows that only about 1 in 15, or 6.5%, of high school players go on to play NCAA men's football. And from there, it's another big step up to the NFL. Of the approximately 16,000 NCAA players eligible for the draft each year, only about 300 make an NFL roster each year. That's about about one in 50, or 2.0 percent.
The NFL assembles only the most elite athletes who've made it through this selection process. As a matter of principle, NFL players are bigger, faster, stronger, and more talented than college players.
Many of the elite athletes in the various college programs find that once they enter the NFL, their previously elite skill set is - at best - par for the course on an NFL team. Which is why NFL teams are obsessed with athleticism over almost anything else, and which is why we as fans pore of 40-yard dash times and short shuttle times so much. You can teach most players to recognize when a defense is in man or zone, but you cannot teach a player to outrun a faster defender.
A little over a decade ago, Nike developed a metric called SPARQ. The idea behind the number was to have a single composite number that would allow you to quickly assess the athleticism of a player with a single number. The Seattle Seahawks are one of the NFL teams using a SPARQ-like metric in their player evaluations, and some of their staff was involved in the creation of SPARQ.
Unfortunately, Nike never published the exact formula for the SPARQ metric. But an enterprising blogger for Field Gulls, Zach Whitman, reverse-engineered an approximation of the formula, and while he doesn't divulge the formula either, at least he published the results of his calculations at 3sigmaathlete.com. Whitman uses eight inputs for his metric, which he calls pSPARQ: player weight, bench press, broad jump, vertical jump, forty-yard dash, ten-yard split, short shuttle and 3-cone drill.
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