No Combine - Senior Bowl Has Greater Importance

[Grizzled]

The Combine as traditionally held is pretty much off, at least for 2021. The Senior Bowl will be a chance to teams to see guys in game situations. I'd think the Bears will be closely watching a number of QBs, OTs, and WRs among others. Trask and Jones have both been invited.

[Moriarty]

Do have any articles? I was wondering about Combine.

Is Combine really less safe than Senior Bowl??
Or all these other games?

Maybe a few parts should be scrapped, but you can do heights, weights, 40, etc with either no contact or fairly easy wipedowns.

[Otis Day]

Maybe it is just me, not sure, but how much do you put into the Senior Bowl? You could have 3 yrs of game tape/film on a kid and he could play shitty at the Sr Bowl, do you write him off?

The combine, how much is put into shit show? Are the measurements going to sway you one way or the other if the kid was kicking ass for 2 yrs in real games?

[Grizzled]

I’m not a big Combine guy, the workout warrior syndrome sometimes blinds teams. Game film, pro day workouts, scouting at games, individual interviews will have to suffice. NFL teams were very limited in seeing games.

[Z Bear]

Maybe it is just me, not sure, but how much do you put into the Senior Bowl?

The practices mean more than the game itself. The lineman drills and the DBs vs WRs drills from these practices mean a lot to the scouts.

[Moriarty]

I'm a HUGE Combine guy.

Sure, people make mistakes based on Combine results.
But you don't tally those mistakes up in a vacuum.
You have to balance against how many and how bad your mistakes would be without that information.


Two quick, easy Bear examples:

Brian Urlacher
He'd have gone reasonably high, sure. But no way in hell does a rover back from New Mexico State get anywhere near top 10 without his insane measurables.

Charles Tillman
Also went to a podunk school (Louisiana–Lafayette) and didn't even get a Senior Bowl invite. Got picked at 35 because he blew up the Combine with best/near best scores among CBs at everything, despite being the biggest one there. Without that, he very likely still would have been on the board at one hundred 35.

And those are just positive case examples, because they're easiest.
But the much more frequent ones are the negative case examples - guys who really produced in college, but don't get picked high or pan out in the pros, because they don't have the size/speed/agility/explosion for it. It's tough to quantify, because you can never directly prove "this team would have taken him in slot X, if his numbers hadn't been so poor". But it happens all the time. And it's right the overwhelming majority of the time. It's why the rare exceptions make such good stories.

[Moriarty]

Maybe it is just me, not sure, but how much do you put into the Senior Bowl? You could have 3 yrs of game tape/film on a kid and he could play shitty at the Sr Bowl, do you write him off?

Tricky

For small-school guys, it's usually your only chance to see them face quality opponents.
For others, the importance isn't the same.

[aussiebear99]

this year, there should be a Junior Bowl as well .. !!

[Atkins&Rebel]

The combine is crucial for small school guys that can show they have the same measurables and athletic ability as some of the premium talent of the Ohio States and Clemsons. The big thing that would cast some worry IMO, would be the revolving interviews where players can go through several teams in a short amount of time. If they found a way to make the interviews safe, the rest of the combine should be relatively safe

[thunderspirit]

+1 to Mori and Atkins&Rebel.

The Combine matters because it's a check on a scout's eye test. People have biases, and the idea of measuring athleticism is that sometimes the numbers don't match what you've seen, which makes you go back and double check (or at least should make you do that). And they're especially important for the non-Power 5 guys who didn't play great competition every game. Are they a big fish in a small pond, or is there something special there? (The all-star bowls help for the same reason.)

[RichH55]

Maybe it is just me, not sure, but how much do you put into the Senior Bowl? You could have 3 yrs of game tape/film on a kid and he could play shitty at the Sr Bowl, do you write him off?

The combine, how much is put into shit show? Are the measurements going to sway you one way or the other if the kid was kicking ass for 2 yrs in real games?

Otis,

Everyone knows the stakes at the Senior Bowl though - and generally you are going up against actual NFL Caliber players

And in College games - How many matter? Especially if you aren't a SEC or Big Ten player? The sample size of film that "really" matters in College is much less than people make it out to be IMHO

Take Eskridge for example