There’s an idea out there that some of the Titans’ draft failures are related to Ruston Webster placing a high value on athletic testing scores. I’ve seen this idea mooted for a while, at least since before the 2015 draft, but what got me to finally write this post was this post with some of the numbers for players who’ve been disappointments.
Naturally, since I’m a cynical jerk contrarian, I wanted to take my own look at things and see just how well this gloss held up.
My Idea
My hypothesis is that if Ruston Webster was a fan of athletic testing, we would expect Titans draft picks to have above-average athletic testing scores, and players at the same position would tend to perform better on the same tests. To that end, I looked up the athletic testing scores for every draft pick of the Ruston Webster as GM era (2012-15) who had worked out at the Combine. That encompasses 25 of the Titans’ 29 draft picks. It’s not a perfect sample size, by any means, with a couple or maybe even just one player chosen at each position, but it’s what we have to work with. Many of the players likely did or re-did some or all of the drills at their pro days. An NFL team would likely blend those pro day numbers (possibly with an adjustment based on conditions) with the Combine results for a “truer” picture of a prospect’s athleticism. I am intentionally not doing this to get the most level playing field I can (and also because I’m lazy).
The Methodology
To do this work, I went to Mock Draftable and got the position-based percentiles for each draft prospect for the five tests that tend to be done across positions and for which I’ve seen the clearest arguments that they correlate most closely to performance at the NFL level. Those tests are:
- the 40-yard dash;
- the vertical jump;
- the broad jump;
- the three-cone drill; and
- the 20-yard short shuttle.
These are not the only drills a team could value, but I think they’re likely to be the ones valued the most and strong performance on another drill the team would value is likely to show up in at least one of those drills.
The full percentile results for each draft pick for the tests they did can be viewed here; in the case of players who may have been listed at more than one position, I’ve listed them under a primary position and also listed their results as it would have been for a different position. By and large, these would not significantly impact a player’s overall results. Not to pick on him specifically, but Jeremiah Poutasi is not a plus athlete for a guard and would not be a plus athlete for an offensive tackle.
Initial Results
The results for each of the five tests are similar: the prospects the Titans drafted scored above-average on each of the five tests, but on the whole just a little bit above average. Even with David Cobb’s injury-affected dash thrown out, they averaged at the 55th percentile on the 40, the 51st on the vertical jump, the 60th on the broad jump, the 57th on the three-cone drill, and the 57th on the short shuttle. Those encompass a range of actual scores, but overall they don’t suggest the Titans have a strong cross-positional preference for one or another of the drills.
The Positional Comparisons
Fine, so let’s look at specific positions. If Ruston Webster is valuing athletic testing, then I would expect have some of the same trait preferences for the same position. Is there evidence that he does? I’m not really sure that there is.
Take his two high picks at cornerback-Blidi Wreh-Wilson and Coty Sensabaugh. Sensabaugh made the post I linked above because of his above-average 40-yard dash and three-cone times. But Wreh-Wilson did not score well in either of those. He did score well in the broad jump, but Sensabaugh’s was just average. In none of the five drills did both score at or above the 60th percentile of Combine participants at cornerback.
Wide receiver is another example of the same phenomenon, only here we have three picks to work with-Dorial Green-Beckham, Justin Hunter, and Kendall Wright. An n=2 of Hunter and Wright would lead you to believe Webster valued the vertical jump, but Green-Beckham tested poorly in that area. About all we could say is Webster does not value the short shuttle; Green-Beckham and Hunter both did poorly on that drill, and Wright was barely better than average. There is no drill where all three scored better than average by the standards of NFL wide receivers. Even if you cabin off Wright into a separate slot receiver category, just one but not both of Green-Beckham and Hunter scored better than average for a receiver in three tests. The only one where both were better than average was the 40, and Green-Beckham’s was not that impressive.
Red Herrings in Favor of Athletic Testing
That gets into one of the reasons I think Webster’s focus on athleticism is overrated: some of his draft picks are reputed to be much better athletes than they actually tested to be. Green-Beckham is a great example of that. He is a very good athlete for a man of his size, but as I mentioned in the WR preseason positional analysis he is not a plus athlete by the standards of NFL wide receivers. One of the players who might be the poster boy for the Titans allegedly valuing athleticism over football ability, Zach Brown, is another. There’s no question Brown ran a great 40 at the Combine, much better than the one Lavonte David ran. But Brown was below average on both his jumps (he did not run the three-cone or short shuttle at the Combine), while David was above average on both. If you look at their average percentile on the three drills, Brown was at the 56th percentile while David was at 51st, significantly closer than the popular perception would have them.
Another of the reasons for the perception Webster values athletic testing is the Titans’ first two picks in the 2014 draft, Taylor Lewan and Bishop Sankey, were both exceptional athletic testers, among the tops in their position group by SPARQ. No doubt both tested extremely well. Lewan gets to one of the problems involved in this exercise, that valuing athletic testing shows up most closely when the Titans have a choice between players who may have been similarly ranked. The two other of the consensus top three tackles were off the board, so we didn’t get to see the Titans choose from among them. Another interesting test would have been if the Titans had the choice of either Wreh-Wilson or his collegiate teammate Dwayne Gratz, who tested much better; the analytics-friendly Jaguars had their choice before Tennessee was on the clock and picked Gratz.
Looking for Values in Athletic Testing Results?
Sankey has his own interesting parallel. He is not the only back on the Titans roster from the 2014 draft class. He did not make my spreadsheet because the Titans did not draft him, but Antonio Andrews also worked out at the same Combine. And while Sankey tested extremely well, Andrews tested extremely poorly. I suppose the argument could be that Sankey’s test scores helped him because it helped validate an assessment on tape while Andrews’ were not important because it wasn’t what he showed on tape, my mental model of an organization that values athletic testing is one that places a consistent value on athletic testing rather than ignoring it when inconvenient.
If Webster indeed placed that much emphasis on athletic testing, then players like Andrews are a good example of where I’d expect to see it-those later round picks and undrafted free agents where physically talented, highly skilled, and highly accomplished players are all gone and teams have to choose between maybe just one or two of those traits. This is kind of a tough comparison, because the players chosen later in the draft are those most likely not to have been invited to the Combine in the first place. On the whole, though, Webster’s Titans have chosen a mix of players who have tested well (Tre McBride, Scott Solomon) and some who have not (Daimion Stafford, Khalid Wooten). As I’ve catalogued in the past, the undrafted free agent pool is not one the Titans have tended to delve deeply into or to seem to value, but in my breakdowns of the UDFAs, particularly strong athletic testers have not stood out the way they have for organizations like the Seahawks and Jaguars.
Ruston Webster’s Thoughts
Additionally, Ruston Webster in his public comments hasn’t seemed to put a high value on strong athletic testing results. What got the good folks at Field Gulls on to the job of back-calculating SPARQ in the first place was public comments by I believe both Pete Carroll and GM John Schneider about athletic tests and players, draft picks or otherwise, scoring well on them. I can’t claim to have listened to absolutely everything Webster has publicly said as Titans general manager, but I’ve heard most of it and transcribed or taken notes on much of that and don’t recall any similar hints. Instead, I believe he’s referred to athletic testing scores as part of the puzzle without specifying the importance of particular tests (or tests like SPARQ that come from a variety of inputs). What he has spoken about is how the later rounds of the draft are where the scouts (the traditional ones, who don’t necessarily know much about or value athletic testing) are spending the most time advocating for their players.
It’s possible that Webster has just been cagey in his public comments, as it feels like he tends to be. Like some of his pre-draft comments have pointed to particular picks, though, let’s assume he is being relatively straightforward, and athletic testing results are just a small piece of the puzzle. What would we expect to see then?
An Alternative Explanation
There are more players invited to the Combine each year than they are picks in the NFL draft, and players not invited to the Combine are picked in the NFL draft. I haven’t done all the work on this, but I bet the average drafted Combine invitee has superior athletic testing scores to the average non-drafted Combine invitee.
Thus, an organization that put no significant value on testing would likely have players that tested out above average on most Combine drills, just like the Titans do. If players with above-average Combine test results are those most likely to be drafted, especially high, then a team with an average or above percentage of higher-round picks would likely have overall above-average Combine tests among all their picks, just like the Titans do. That same organization might have some players who tested well or extremely well in some areas, but they would also have players who tested poorly in multiple areas.
Squaring the Lewan/Sankey “valuing athleticism” argument with the Wright pick or a 2015 draft class that came out pretty average by SPARQ is an argument I haven’t seen made, and that I don’t think can be made convincingly. Adding to the misperception is that there are five tests on which a player could score well; an above-average player is likely to score well on at least one of them, necessitating a more in-depth look like the sort I have attempted to provide in this post to see if that’s just a one-off or evidence of a broader trend in favor of good testers or at least just physical minimums at a position.
Conclusion-Type Thoughts
Does all that mean I think for sure Ruston Webster places very little if any value on athletic testing? No, that’s a step too far. We only have so many data points and it’s possible that at one or a small number of positions he strongly values specific tests. But I think given a broader look at the data there’s not a convincing argument he does place much, if any value specifically on athletic testing and the evidence we have is consonant with a world where he places very little, if any value on athletic testing.
With his contract reportedly expiring soon, I’d expect Ruston Webster to be moving on from his current position as Tennessee Titans general manager. Frankly, it’s extremely hard for me to make a case from the outside that he does deserve to retain his position (if he stays, I’ll try making the theoretical case on his behalf). But I’m unconvinced that his failures in drafting comes from placing too much value on athletic testing.
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