The NFL Draft is an annual event that allows for teams in the National Football League to pick players coming out of college to improve their respective teams, and is often considered the most significant event in the NFL offseason. The event is so significant that it is held in major cities across the United States, and fans of all the teams come to the event to support (or criticize) their team’s draft decision. The area that often generates the most amount of criticism is the first round of the NFL draft, as the players who are selected in this round are considered best prospects available. This means that when these players don’t live up to expectations, the teams miss out on a chance to improve and compete with the rest of the NFL. Due to how extensive and complicated the pre-draft process has become in recent years, with game film, combine/pro day results, and much more at every teams’ disposal, it’s hard to understand why teams still miss out on potential impact players. However, a common theme in first round “busts” has been that teams became too enamored in their combine results, which causes many to criticize its usefulness in determining player success. The overvaluation of the NFL Scouting Combine, compiled with the routine practice of reaching for players that may fill a team need, all contribute to teams missing in the NFL Draft. To solve this issue, teams should use all the information and technology at their disposal in the pre-draft process to discover a prospect who has the greatest chance of becoming an All-Pro, even if it means not filling a team need at the time of the draft.  

While the NFL Draft has become a commonplace in today’s NFL, it should be noted that it was born from very humble origins. Back in the early 1930’s, Philadelphia Eagles owner Bert Bell discovered a recurring problem when it came to signing players, “Players were choosing to play whichever team offered the most money, best chance to win, best place to live or some combination of the above. Low-budget (or poorly performing) teams couldn't attract top talent” (Schalter). This is where he proposed a method for selecting incoming players that would help keep the league competitive and all teams satisfied, the NFL Draft. The NFL Commissioner at the time, Joe F. Carr, then helped implement the draft into an annual event, and also helped modernize and improve it over the rest of his time as commissioner (Willis 349). The first drafts that were conducted varied much differently with today’s NFL Drafts, mostly due to the fact that the pre-draft processes back then basically did not exist and teams picked players solely based on college performance and coaching recommendations (Schalter). This is where NFL owners slowly started implementing their own pre-draft process into the NFL, and these processes would soon become a commonplace in the modern pre-draft processes. 

The first individual who began revolutionizing the NFL Draft process was New York Giants owner Wellington Mara, who, in 1939, started travelling around the country to look for undiscovered talent. Los Angeles Rams owner Dan Reeves improved upon on this idea in 1946 by hiring someone to do this work for him, creating the first NFL scout (Schalter). Eventually, more scouts were added to each team and then more advanced data analysis was implemented that allowed for NFL teams to have an extremely detailed database on all of the players available (Schalter). Then, in 1977 teams began creating scouting combines that tested players physical skills and gave medical evaluations to players. This lead to the final implementation on the NFL Scouting Combine that was created for all teams in 1982, and this national combine was then moved to Indianapolis in 1987, where it is still held to this day (Schalter). With all these new advancements and improvements added to the NFL Draft process, the popularity of the NFL grew immensely and the NFL Combine and the NFL Draft both became major television events, drawing large amounts of viewers from across the country (Schalter). These additions and newfound popularity in the NFL Draft helped make the entire process much more complicated, and may be the reason why teams seem to overvalue some parts of the process over others, which may lead to them “missing” on prospects in the first round. The NFL Scouting Combine in particular is a new addition that seems to play too much of an influence on NFL scouts. 

Since the implementation of the first NFL Scouting Combines in 1977, new tests and evaluations were added to the process so that teams could better understand the players that were available. Some of these new additions included the 40-yard dash, the broad and vertical jumps, the bench press, positional drills, player-team interviews, and medical evaluations. There are also dozens of other tests conducted, which allows for a vast amount of data to become available on each player (Kuzmitz). However, with all this information at teams’ disposal, it can cause teams to overvalue players simply due to their physical and athletic skills, not their actual football skills. One specific test that seems to cause the biggest boost in draft stock for players is the 40-yard dash, as this determines simply how fast a player is, and thus determines if that player can either keep up with or even outrun other NFL players. Luca Celebre investigates this in his video, “The Evolution of the NFL Combine”, and discusses how players are able to significantly boost their draft stock due to the 40-yard dash, but also states that only 1 of the 14 players with the fastest 40 times has actually become an All-Pro in the National Football League (Celebre). This information clearly shows how overvalued the 40-yard dash is, especially when it has a proven low success rate when it comes to determining player success in the NFL. This begins to show how invaluable the NFL Scouting Combine can be when it comes to selecting players in the NFL Draft, and leads many to the conclusion that NFL teams and talent evaluators should use other methods when it comes to selecting players in the draft. 
