Fantasy Football Daily - NFL Combine Results and the Importance of Athletic Testing with Kent Lee Platte | On the Clock! NFL Draft Podcast

Episode Date: March 9, 2023

Brett Whitefield (@BGWhitefield) and Kent Lee Platte (@MathBomb) dig into Kent's specialty for the 2023 NFL Draft Class: Combine results and what prospects stand out in athletic testing. Interested in playing Best Ball in 2023? There's no better place than Underdog Fantasy. Use our code FANTASYPTS to sign up for a new account at Underdog, and not only will you get a 100% deposit match up to $100... but you'll get a Fantasy Points Standard subscription for only $5! https://www.fantasypoints.com/underdog --- Support this podcast: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/fantasy-points-podcast/support Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

It's time to the Fantasy Points podcast brought to you by FantasyPoints.com. Top level fantasy football and NFL betting analysis from every perspective and angle, from numbers to the film room, with a single goal to help you score more fantasy points. We are back with another episode of On the Clock. I am your host, Brett Whitefield, and today we have a super perfect guest. He's also very special to me. His name is Kent Laplatt. Does I say that right?

Right, Kent Lee Plattie. Kent Lee Plattie. Gosh, Dick, I've been butchering that since I've known you. No, and that's what's funny is I started using my middle name because everybody mispronounce my last name. And then when I did that, people started mispronouncing my middle name and my last name. It's like they couldn't get over that. Yeah, that's what I've known you for how long now, Kent? What?

I, seven or eight. It's been a while. Yeah, it's been a while. We've broken bread together. We've gone to Lions practices together. We saw each other mobile last year. So Kent and I have been around the block together, but he's the perfect guess for the post-combine week.

Because Kent, I don't know if you guys know this, but he's developed a little something called Relative Athletic Score. He's kind of the, I would say, he is the encyclopedia when it comes to athletic testing measurements in the NFL. Whether you like the RAS or not, that is firmly true. I don't think anybody knows more about athletic testing and scoring than Kent does. So you can find him on Twitter at MathBom. He is the dude of the hour.

And so, Kent, with that, I'll say you are on the clock. That's glad to be here, man. I'm glad you brought me on. I obviously love talking about this stuff. Yes, absolutely. So I really wanted to have you on. I know you've probably been doing the rounds talking about, you know, the Anthony Richardson's of the world and all these freak show performances, which, you know, we'll get into some player-specific stuff. later as well.

But you've also been producing a lot of really cool information lately about success in the NFL and how athleticism translates or correlates directly to that success. And more importantly, how elite athleticism impacts productivity in the NFL. And I've been fascinated by this. Can you give me some rattle off some data points that you put out? I think it was last week you tweeted some stuff about evaluating NFL rosters and how many players, successful players in the NFL. and rostered players are elite.

Yeah, and I've been trying to get a way to link NFL rosters directly to the page. I mean, it's easy to copy and paste the rosters from one place to another, but I have to link them up to the scores. And I found a way to do that. I won't say it's easy, but it's easy enough that I'm able to do it reliably and be able to update it fairly reliably. And I found out a lot of really neat information that I didn't really expect, which was that roughly 80% of an NFL roster is above average for athleticism.

I'm rounding a little bit here. I think it's like 81 and 19 or something. But over 80% of players on an NFL roster are above average athleticism based on something like RAS. And almost more than 45% are above 8 on RAS, which is that elite athleticism range. So nearly half of players that make an NFL roster are the very top in terms of athletic testing, which was quite a surprise for me. Yeah, that's insane. And the reason I'm bringing this up, too, is because this time of year, especially, if a lot of people that decide to shout from the mountaintops that you're overrating

athleticism, you're overrating the combine. And then when you actually look at the numbers, maybe we're not overrating the combine. Sure, there's going to be cases where a wide receiver runs a crazy 40, and he gets overdrafted, right? Because all of a sudden now, but typically tape matches the testing, typically speaking, especially with good level players or guys that should be drafted in the first round. So these numbers are, that's astounding to me, 81% of NFL rostered players are above average athleticism.

That tells you like almost everything you need to know. I'm assuming these. You can say it doesn't matter all you want, but it very clearly does to NFL evaluators. And we've got plenty of examples of guys that succeed who don't have those elite testing metrics, but it really points out how rare those types of guys are. Yeah, for sure. I mean, I have my own personal anecdote with you specifically. I think right around the time we first met or started engaging with each other on Twitter

was the Derek Barnett Miles Garrett draft class. I was pounding table for Derek Barnett as this elite prospect. You were cautioning me like, hey, this guy doesn't have the juice to be a highly productive player in the NFL. and I at this that was my first year doing my current scoring system too with prospects. I basically ignored the athletic testing, continued to pound the table for Derek Barnett, and the rest is history. He has not been a very productive player.

He's an okay player. He's a rotational guy who makes sense, but I was talking about him as a top 10 pick, and that would not have been good value out of a top 10 pick. Yeah, he had good testing for a nose tackle, which at the time, that was my argument for him, was like, for a nose tackle, that's really good because like nose tackles, they only really need weight, broad, and bench, which is three out of ten metrics. So their scores tend to suck because they're only good in three of ten things. And Barnett was fine in those areas.

And he tested high enough in the other areas that you're like, as a nose tackle, that's a really athletic nose tackle. But it's just not the kind of value that you look for higher up in the draft. And if you're taking a guy that doesn't have that kind of score, that tape has to be, it has to be enough that you're looking at those numbers and being like, I don't even care. There's some other reason for it that you think that they win. Maybe they win in a different way, which we've seen with guys like Orlando Brown,

who just isn't an athletic dude, but he doesn't win using his athleticism. He wins using his intelligence, his length, his understanding of how guys are going to move and knowing where he's supposed to be. So it doesn't show up in the testing. So it doesn't matter that it's not there in the testing. Yeah. Sometimes NFL teams properly hedged though, right? Like Orlando Brown wasn't a first round pick.

Right, he went all the way to third round. Right. Dalvin Cook was another guy that year, too, who I was pounded at the table for. And he ends up, like, the NFL hedged a little bit. They took him in the second round, and he ends up being an outlier as far as his athleticism goes. He was such a surprise when he tested poorly, too. I mean, that's one of those times where you look at the tape and you're like, God, that doesn't line up at all. Yeah, I think he had, what, a good 40 and everything else stunk?

Yeah, pretty much. Very interesting. All right. So let's talk about position specific. things because this is even more fascinating to me because one of the things I found looking at your data is like athleticism matters a lot to certain positions and less so to others and tight end is one of them that blows my mind. In fact, like you want elite level athlete tight ends and those are most of your top producers in the NFL have been elite athletes, correct?

Yeah. And it's, you know, you're George Kittles, your Travis Kelsey's. Even your flash in the pan guys like Jordan Cameron and the guys that just kind of show up, they generally are those elite athletes. With tight end, as much as it is that the higher end athletic guys succeed, it's also that you just don't see lower athletic guys succeed in the NFL. We've seen guys with lower testing succeed at offensive tackle, guard, wide receiver, all these other positions. We have not seen that at tight end for more than 20 years. The only tight end who's gotten a single 750-yard season or more and had a below-average raz

was Jordan Reed. And he didn't complete all of his testing because, as it would be for most of Jordan Reed's career, he was injured at the time of the combine. So he ran injured and never finished his testing. His score ended up below average because he's a smaller tight end. And he's the only guy. We don't have an outlier at tight end that we can point to who tested poorly and is still successful in the NFL.

That is actually wild. And when you watch Jordan's tape, too, you saw a pretty good mover out there. He clearly was struggling with injury. And he missed out on the agility drills, which I think he would have crushed the agility drills, I think, if he did him. For sure. That is really fascinating, too. And you see this a lot.

Like, tight end seems to be one of the few positions where a guy comes out of nowhere and it's, like, fantastic, whether it's Antonio Gates coming from basketball or Jimmy Graham or even day. Aaron Waller switching from receiver to tight end. And the reason they transitioned so well is because they are freak athletes. And they're going to either outrun linebackers or they're going to be so big that safeties can't stop them. And I mean, it really seems like a simple cheat code of, all right, we got a freak athlete.

Let's just put them at tight end and see what happens. So this brings me to Zach Koontz of Old Dominion. I know you've probably talked about them at nauseam this week. But this is a guy who when I watched the tape, I didn't see most athletic tight end prospect ever necessarily, but you do see a lot of those traits. What are you thinking about, Zach? Yeah, I mean, at 6, 7 and 255 pounds running a 4-5-5, that's bonkers. That's the kind of speed you don't usually see at that kind of size.

You know, a really good wide receiver. That would be a really good wide receiver being that tall and that big and that fast. That's plenty of speed if he wanted to play on the outside. I don't think you would. I think he would be better as a mismatch than putting one outside. But the fact that he could is just a testament to how. athletic he was. He had a 40-inch vertical, which is a 99th percentile. He had a 10-8 broad, which is 98th percentile. And it always comes too well, you know, he's going to stink at the

agilities. No, 96th and 95th percentile agility drills. He had a 6.87 cone time, which for ignoring everything else, the fact that he's 6, 7 and a half almost and running a 6-8-7 cone is insane. That level of bend at that size is nuts. You don't usually see that kind of athleticism. So he's definitely a guy to watch. He's coming from a school that is going to have a pretty big jump from college to the NFL. And as you mentioned, it doesn't really stand out quite as much on tape. He doesn't have the production to match those higher rounded guys. But neither did Jalani Woods when he came out last year. He got drafted a lot higher than people expected. And he was reasonably productive in the time that he was and is projected

to be much better going forward. So you bank on traits with tight end. Yeah. With Coons, you know, one thing I noticed on tape, though, is his frame is so freaking big that when he's running full speed, you even saw this with the 40. It doesn't necessarily even look like he's moving that fast. Those strides are so long. He gets on top of safeties immediately.

And they're almost confused by it. Like, whoa, how did this guy get here? And if you put him on a two-way go where he's, you know, got the corner of the post option or he's just running a seam. I think he's a threat, a big-time vertical threat in the NFL. They almost were able to do that at will, an old dominion. That margin of error is so small, too, because if you're even a fraction of a second late as a safety, you've got to cover of the ground that he can cover, and he can cover a lot of it,

and you have to account for that size. And it's just such a small margin of error if this guy has the kind of football talent that he does athleticism. Yeah, that catch radius is enormous. So like if you're giving the safety's a little bit of pause because you are getting on their heels quickly. And then you have the catch radius to boot. It's almost like you can't miss window for Coons. So I do think he's going to probably get drafted higher than anyone imagined two weeks ago. And I'm assuming NFL teams new.

You know, what do you feel about that? Can you think these teams kind of know and the combine's more just for fan service? NFL teams have their own dedicated analytics department. And I get this question a lot when people ask like how, do NFL teams use Raz? And Raz was developed to be a media and fan-facing metric. It's meant to be a way for fans to contextualize testing metrics in a way that allows them to understand this stuff a little bit better than they would just hearing the raw numbers. NFL teams have dedicated analytics departments that have been working for decades. They probably have their own statistics that they have built out on their own complicated calculations. I think Raz is a good analog of that. But all these teams have their own dedicated analytics departments.

And a lot of those guys watch tape, just like I do, looking specifically for athletic traits. They're watching a guy when he gets off the line to try to gauge where that level of explosiveness is. They're watching him running up the seam full tilt. Is he running full tilt? Because you can tell with a guy's gate whether or not he's even running at his full speed. And if he is, is that speed sufficient for what you want to project him to do in the NFL? There's a lot of guys checking boxes in the NFL scouting departments. Yeah, that's fascinating.

I know for my own work that I do because I have a weighted scoring system. I put all the prospects through. It's four main buckets and there's many buckets within those buckets. One of my big main buckets is athleticism. And I have basically, I wouldn't say it's near the complexity of the RAS system, but I have benchmarks. I check for certain archetypes of player. And I'm definitely, when I'm, the moment I start watching prospects,

I start checking those boxes. Okay, you know, where's his burst at? What's his acceleration? And then that way, by the time they do the combine testing, I like have a reference point of, you know, hey, am I off on this guy? Do I need to rewatch something? So, yeah, I mean, it totally makes sense. Where, other than tight end, what are some of the most, the other positions that are most affected by athleticism in terms of success at the NFL level? Pass rusher is easily the biggest one on defense. The guys that are rushing from the edge have to be very athletic.

you rarely see guys who don't test very well, who find success as pass rushers in the NFL. And there's a lot of situations where you have guys that are successful and have lower testing who are inside, outside guys. They don't necessarily fit that traditional defensive end mold. We see that with guys like DeForest Buckner, who's now, I think, a full-time tackle. Eric Armstead, Zadarius Smith, guys like that that work inside and outside. So it's a different – they have more than enough athleticism inside. Maybe they don't have quite the type of athleticism you'd have for a true straight edge on the outside. But they find a way to win with the athleticism that they do have.

On the opposite side of the ball, offensive tackles, right? Those are the guys that have to block those really fast, extremely athletic defensive ends. So you get those guys a lot. Linebacker is the one where we have some more notable low testing guys, the most recent one being Nick Bolton, who didn't test very well. Darius Leonard, though there was an asterisk neck to him because of injury, you got hurt during the combine. We have a couple of examples of higher profile guys who didn't test well,

but in general, that's a position where you really want those athletic guys. You want explosive guys who have speed and range. Size doesn't even really matter all that much anymore. And the fact these guys are still scoring high on a composite metric like RAS, even despite having lower size, really tells you the type of athleticism you need, because you've got to make up for that in terms of math and scoring.

Yeah, because all your scores are height and weight adjusted, correct? Yeah, the height and weight are scored themselves on a bigger is better type of scale. It's not an ideal like it is for all the other testing metrics. It's just bigger is better because that's used to weight the other scores. So it's part of the main calculation so it waits for size. Gotcha. That makes sense. Yeah, I was going to ask you specifically about that in regards to the wide receiver because it seems like every year the receivers are getting smaller and smaller and smaller.

And this year you look at like the top 10 guys, what, like seven of them are under 180 pounds. I mean, it's crazy. That would have been a huge red flag, even just a few years ago, having this many guys that small. Devanta Smith is a good example of that. The Slim Reaper, man. But yeah, you don't usually see guys that small, but that changes. The NFL is cyclical, so we'll get those guys, and then we're going to start seeing cornerbacks starting to account for that. We're going to see smaller cornerbacks finding more play to counter that. And then, of course, you're going to see bigger receivers start to

come out to counter those smaller corners, and then it'll flip. We'll just keep doing that every couple of years. Yeah, you're already starting to see the transition for the cornerbacks because we were, what, during the Richard Sherman years, everyone was looking for that 6-3 long corner. Now you're getting back to some of the smaller guys. Even this year, you have Witherspoon and Emmanuel Forbes and Deonté Banks isn't that big, is he? I think he's 511 or something like that. Yeah, he's not super big. Even body weight ways, yeah, even body weight-wise these guys are dropping too.

Witherspoon's, what, 180 pounds? Lean guys, man. 166 or something crazy. Like, yeah, it is funny how cyclical it is. All right, let's get to this combine specifically then, Kent. Is, were there any guys that surprised you? Were you, you know, didn't necessarily expect them to blow it out that did? I know everyone wants to talk about Anthony Richardson.

Listen, I got news for you guys. If you didn't know he was going to do what he did at the combine, then you didn't watch his tape. I mean, that's... We were just waiting. There was some rumors he wasn't going to run. And I was like, no, we need it. We need this. We got robbed from so many good athletes.

You know, Malik Willis didn't test. We lost out on Kyler Murray. Lamar didn't test. We missed out on all those. We really needed one of those super athlete guys to test, and I'm glad that he did. There's a couple guys that I kind of knew were pretty athletic that got to show it, which is a guy like Luke Musgrave out of Oregon State who had a 9.95. You know, for any position, that's great.

Again, we already talked about how important that is for tight end. And one guy I don't think people expected to test as well as he did was John Gaines out of UCLA. He's a guard. He had a 9.95 also, one of the best testing players. We had the same thing for City Sow at Guard out of Eastern Michigan. I really didn't hear anybody talking him up as a good tester and he just blew it out of the water. Trenton Simpson, everybody kind of expected to test really well coming out of Clemson. But I don't think people expect him to test on that level, right?

He got really up there. And then another big one that came out of nowhere was Blake Freeland out of Brigham Young. I actually do a podcast with BYU Radio every year talking about how good their strength and conditioning program. Because it's one of those programs that doesn't really get a lot of respect for how good their strength and conditioning program is. But they produce guys like this every single year, guys that are able to test off the charts because they really understand how those transferable skills work. They understand that these plays. players are going to be going from college to pros, they have to be able to display that level of athleticism. They train their guys really well. So when they come out to do these drills at the

combine, they're very well prepared. But he's nearly six eight. He had a sub five, 40, seven point four six cone drill, a 37 inch vertical, which is one of the best verticals for an offensive tackle ever, rather not at the combine or pro days, anything. And a 10 foot broad, which is also a 99th percentile numbers. It's just incredible numbers for an offensive tack. Good stuff from Kent on Blake Freeland. That is BYU offensive tackle was a combined juggernaut. Unfortunately, we lost Kent. We bid him a farewell. And thanks again, Kent, for coming on the pod. Everyone give him a special shout out on Twitter. You can find him at Mathbaum. I know he does a lot of analytic stuff for Pro Football Network as well and kind of

implements his athletic scoring into some of their college football write-ups. Please check out his work. It's fantastic stuff. Before we get off here, I do want to talk about some exciting things coming up at fantasy points. We have the draft guide coming out. Actually, I got to talk to Mr. Joseph Dolan about this, but I think the first published date is either a week from today or a week from tomorrow. that would be Thursday, March 15th or Friday, March 16th, something like that.

I know the first push is going to have over 75 offensive players in it. I spent a lot of time getting those skill players done and ready for you guys. I know a large part of our subscriber base are fantasy players, since we are a fantasy company at heart. So I've definitely put all my early focus on those guys. I have watched tape now on 164 guys. I'm basically watching tape for about four hours a day and then writing the other eight to ten hours that I'm working

on top of doing the pod. So as we, I guess we're turning the corner here where I'm going to be able to start writing a lot quicker given that I have pretty much everyone watched and scored through my process. So the next update will have a bunch of defensive guys and it will start trickling those in. When it's all said done, we should have no problem

getting to over 150 prospects. My personal goal is 200. We want to really put out a good product for you guys and something that's really informative. So as you're watching the draft and as your favorite team is drafting, hopefully most of the guys they select will be found in the draft guide.

I know we're not going to get all the way there, but 200 is a pretty good number there. So everyone, thank you so much for listening. I couldn't appreciate you guys more than I do. It truly is. I get so much feedback from you guys and the DMs on Twitter especially. and it's just, it's kind of awesome to see the support.

We will be back tomorrow with another episode. I currently do not have a guest lined up, which means it will be Brett Solo, Dolo, just ranting about prospects for a half hour, which is, you know, that's a good way to spend your time, in my opinion. Anyways, have a terrific day. I will see you tomorrow. Out.

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