Drills do not always determine how a player will turn out.
The NFL Scouting Combine will start on Thursday, Feb. 27 and will go until Sunday, March 2. There will be a lot of speculation and overreaction to how prospective NFL players perform, but San Francisco 49ers quarterback Brock Purdy's poor showing when he was a prospective draftee is a reminder that the results from the drills should be taken with a grain of salt.
The Iowa State product did not have a good scouting combine. He ranked in the bottom five of all quarterbacks when it came to his 40-yard dash time, vertical jump, height, arm length, and hand size.
Yet, if one looks at all of the quarterbacks selected ahead of Purdy in the 2022 NFL Draft, he is far and away the best of the bunch. It is not even close. He is the only one who is a starter in the NFL and is certainly the only one who was just a play away from being a Super Bowl-winning quarterback.
Even though Purdy did not perform the best at the scouting combine, he did note last season that his 10-yard split during his 40-yard dash was actually faster than running back Christian McCaffrey's and wide receiver Deebo Samuel's, which KNBR verified.
This is a great reminder that while there is a ton of hype surrounding the NFL Scouting Combine, the results really do not tell you who is going to be a good NFL player. The tape that a player has from their days in college where they are actually playing the game rather than just running and jumping while not being tackled or pursued is a much better barometer for what a player is capable of and what he is going to give you in the NFL.
Purdy's poor day at the scouting combine is probably what led to him falling so far in the NFL Draft and almost not even getting selected. The Niners took him with the very last pick in the draft, and they are certainly glad that they did as he bailed the team out in his rookie season when both Trey Lance and Jimmy Garoppolo went down with injuries and he was thrown into the line of fire.
The only thing that stopped him that season was an injury in the NFC Championship Game and the following season he led San Francisco to the Super Bowl and played good enough for the team to win but they lost in overtime.
Now, Purdy looks set to be one of the highest-paid quarterbacks in the game. He has proven that he is a much better quarterback than one would think based off his physical attributes. The fact is that he processes the game and makes quick decisions at a high level which is a metric that cannot be captured at the scouting combine, yet it is immeasurably more of a determinant of how good a quarterback will be than how high they can jump or how big their hands are.
Keep this in mind if any analysts are freaking out over some drill that happens out the scouting combine. Drills are overrated and there is no better example of that than the success Purdy has had as a quarterback in the NFL.
