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Good morning. Duke’s head coach credits his strength coach for the offseason, combine testing sorts athletes but cannot predict the draft, and two NFL performance staffs answer the same long flight in opposite ways. Let’s get into it...
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Duke won the ACC last season and lost three starting offensive linemen off it. Head coach Manny Diaz said the offseason had one purpose. "What this offseason has been about is creating evidence," Diaz said, and the evidence gets built by David Feeley, Duke's director of football sports performance. "David Feeley is elite in the weight room because his standard never wavers," Diaz said. "Our players have the confidence in how we've gotten there."
Redshirt sophomore lineman Bradley Smith described what that feels like from the floor. "While you're in it, it sucks," Smith said. "But when you come out, you feel like you can take on anybody. If we're in a dogfight, we're going to finish, because that's what we always do."
A new study in the Journal of Strength and Conditioning Research took the combine results of 3,681 players and asked two separate questions. Do these tests measure real physical differences between players at the same position? Yes. Do those same numbers tell you which of those players gets drafted? No.
The tests sort cleanly into four qualities - momentum, power, change of direction and strength - and those four capture most of what separates one lineman from another. Run the same numbers against draft outcomes and every model the authors built performed poorly. Undrafted players even outscored drafted ones on several qualities, including receivers on power, change of direction and strength.
Their read is that once a player clears the physical threshold his position demands, testing stops separating him and the pick gets decided by everything else. The combine works as a measuring tool. It does not work as a prediction.
The 49ers and Rams open the season against each other at the Melbourne Cricket Ground on September 11, roughly 8,000 miles out and 17 hours ahead, and the two staffs are solving it in opposite directions. The 49ers fly a full week early so players can reset on Melbourne time before they play. The Rams plan to land as late as they can, the same in and out approach they used in London before beating Jacksonville 35-7.
Kyle Shanahan said the early trip is not his instinct. "I would love to just show up the day before and just play, but I'm not the best when it comes to the science and everything on that stuff," Shanahan said. "So, you ask people who've done it a number of times, you ask people who study it, you take all their opinions in." He was on the fence until the people who study it and his own players landed in the same place.
