NFL Offseason

This past week felt a little more normal…until Sunday where I had to travel up to the Bay Area for less than 24 hours lol.

But I have zero complaints because I got to work with one of my NFL guys that I haven’t seen since last off-season and it's amazing to see the progression as a person and a player.

Seeing the guys year after year after they played a full season is always a very reflective experience.

It makes you think about the work you put in before the season began and seeing what demands they had and how they operated throughout the season.

What worked? What didn’t? What can be improved? What translated?

The first couple weeks of off-season is really just a re-introduction and accumulation phase to prep them for OTA’s.

We slowly incorporate more volume and specificity as the months grow.

Combine, combine, combine

It’s funny because I always tell my combine athletes after they get done with their 40 that I’ll never make them get in a 3 point stance again!

And that’s because they’ll never really need to because the combine 40 is a totally different aspect of training then they will ever have to train for the rest of their career.

It’s no surprise that coaches and trainers usually have comments and questions about the timing at the combine after their guys run, and it was a huge topic of debate this year.

Zybek Sports, the laser technology company that hosts the NFL Combine every year, put out a very interesting data scatter and statistic after this year's event.

The combine is taken off of a “hand start” and “laser finish” meaning there is an operator at the start who manually starts his timer on the athlete’s first motion.

There is also a laser at the start that picks up the time once that first laser gate is tripped when the athlete's hand breaks the field.

Now, we have to understand that these two times will not always match up, as you add in the human element on a manual start.

This will look different in different settings and depending on who is starting the time, as everyone’s reaction time will be different as well.

On average, the data provided from the Zybek study showed that the hand starts were 0.087 seconds faster than the laser starts.

Even when you have the same administrator starting each rep, the data will still be scattered.

And throw more than one “starter” in the mix and the data can differ significantly.

I think that it’s important for companies like this to publish this data so we can see how high the variance is.

All we want is consistency across the board, seeing that the outcome is such an important factor to their overall performance at the event.

It’s very important for not just coaches and trainers to understand the difference between hand times and laser times, but anyone who pays attention to times like parents and athletes.

A time taken on a fully automated laser 40 and the time taken on the stopwatch on an iPhone are incomparable numbers when it comes down to it so I found this tweet particularly interesting and hope y’all do too.

Quote of the Week

"The road to success and the road to failure are almost exactly the same."

-- Colin R. Davis

Appreciate y’all,

Cici

See you again next week!

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