2013 Offseason Update, Week 3

Marquise Goodwin, a wide receiver out of Texas, posted the combine's fastest
40-yard dash and second best broad jump. Photo credit to Yahoo! Sports via NFL Network.

Every Monday during the offseason, I will be recapping some of the biggest stories of the previous week that I did not cover individually. There wasn’t too much big news in the third week of the offseason that I didn’t cover last week, but there are two things worth mentioning.

Chris Johnson Keeps Combine Record

In the offseason before his rookie season, Chris Johnson posted a 4.24 40-yard dash, the fastest recorded in the NFL rookie combine up to that point. Five years later, he is still the record holder.

This year’s fastest 40 was posted by Marquise Goodwin, a wide receiver out of Texas, who ran it in 4.27 seconds.

One combine record was broken this year, as Justin Hunter, a receiver from Tennessee, set the combine record in the broad jump with a leap of 11’ 4”.

Redskins Name Change a League Affair

I read a Washington Post article that brought some insight I had never considered concerning this topic. In fact, it wasn’t even something I was aware of.

Let’s say the Redskins were to bow to public opinion and they decided to change their name. They couldn’t. Or at least, they are not allowed to make that decision by themselves. Dan Snyder cannot just decide that he agrees that the name is offensive and choose to change the name.

A name change would have to be approved by the NFL and other owners in the league, and such an approval would be unlikely, and probably for more than just financial reasons.

Tomorrow I will begin my look at what each team needs to address this season, division by division, starting with the AFC. Next week I will do the same for the NFC divisions.

If you would like to hear my thoughts on any other offseason news from the past week, feel free to contact me via my blog’s Facebook page or my Twitter account, @cpuffnfl.

New Combine Test

Not to worry incoming rookies, the new combine test will be
on the computer, not scantron. Photo from Aerys Offsides.

We all hear so much each year around combine time about the Wonderlic test. How some of the best players of all-time scored very highly and some of the biggest busts of all time scored low. Of course, there have also been very good players who didn’t get great scores and some very bad players who had excellent scores.

The Wonderlic test was first implemented in the NFL by Tom Landry with the Dallas Cowboys about 40 years ago and soon became a part of the rookie experience as players moved from the college ranks to the NFL. It is a 50-question test with a 12-minute time limit.

While most NFL executives feel that the Wonderlic did well enough, it really only measured intelligence. And so a new test was developed and proposed to the NFL, called the Player Assessment Tool, or PAT.

The Wonderlic will not go away; rather the PAT, which is an hour-long computer-based test, will compliment it. The hope is that the new test can measure players’ mental aptitudes, drive, work ethic, and even which coaching styles players will best mesh with.

In fact, the new test may even be able to tell NFL coaches how players will most quickly learn their playbooks. The characteristics of players we can determine from this test are potentially limitless, if the test works as well in practice as it does on paper.

Unfortunately, there are no sample tests to be found online as there are for the Wonderlic, so I can’t tell you what the questions are like. But the attorney who proposed the PAT to the NFL said it is not a test that players can study for.

“We’re trying to capture different ways people are smart,” the attorney said.

Scores will not be shared openly as they are for the Wonderlic. Only one or two executives from each team will know the actual score each player receives on the PAT. Instead, teams will get a list of “coaching points” so they can determine whether a particular player would be a good fit for their organization.

I wish there were more specifics about the test, but it seems like a good idea. On paper, it looks like exactly the addition we need for evaluating rookies. Hopefully it works as well as we hope.

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