Imagine this scenario: You are an Olympic athlete. You’ve trained for years to show your athletic talents on the biggest possible stage. Your training and nutrition are locked in based on the nature and timing of your events. Then, when you arrive at the Olympic facility, you discover that not only are the events different than what you expected, but the schedule also has been changed. This means you have to scramble to prepare for those new events and then sit around for hours waiting for events you thought you’d be performing in the morning, but are now running in the evening, because the powers that be decided to switch them all to prime time.
That’s basically what happened to every prospect in the 2020 scouting combine. The addition of new drills designed to more closely mirror the on-field experience was great in theory, but less effective in practice, as the players themselves were, for the most part, not told about the new drills until they arrived in Indianapolis. This led to a lot of frantic last-minute training, as well as the realization that a lot of training time over the past two months was wasted, because players, agents and trainers also were not informed about drills that were being phased out this year.
That was one problem. The other problem was, that in the NFL’s impetus to turn the combine into a prime-time concern, the league told Jeff Foster, who runs the National Invitational Camp that runs the event’s logistics, to rearrange everything in a short amount of time.
As Foster told Indystar.com before everything went down, this was less than ideal.
“I will tell you that strategically, I never would have implemented this much change in any one year, simply because of the potential domino effect it can have on the logistics involved in the event,” Foster said. “With regard to that, it’s been an incredible challenge.”
The domino effect included, again, the league failing to inform prospects, trainers and agents about the schedule changes. There were nebulous reports that drills previously held in the mornings would now be run in the evenings, but that’s all anybody knew.
A few players were able to transcend all the noise. Most weren’t. One prospect who found himself in the teeth of the new process was Utah running back Zack Moss, who rushed for 1,416 yards and 15 touchdowns on 235 carries in 2019. Moss broke 89 tackles last season, and the tape backs that up. Moss has a furious rushing style that brought Marshawn Lynch to mind when I recently watched tape with him, and he’s never been regarded as a pure speed guy.
That said, the 4.65 40-yard dash Moss ran at the combine last Friday after he strained his left hamstring in the vertical leap caused some concern. Jamal Tooson, Moss’ agent, told me that he fielded countless calls after that 40. His response?
“Zack runs a 40 with a tweaked hamstring at 223 pounds and still runs a 4.65, which is right in line with backs like Mark Ingram and Josh Jacobs, which yields the question: Which is more important, playing football, or running in a straight line at 8 at night after being up for days?”
It’s a valid question we’ve all been asking ourselves for years, in different iterations. It’s also worth mentioning that Kareem Hunt, another back Moss has been compared to (on the field only, it’s important to point out) ran a 4.62 40-yard dash at his combine in 2017. Didn’t matter in terms of production, until Hunt’s off-field conduct caught up to him. Moss has no such concerns, and his tape is entirely valid for any team looking to add a pure power back. The real issue here is how the NFL failed to inform its combine prospects of the new nature and timing of the drills.
“We knew about one of the new drills before we got there — the Duce Staley drill,” Moss told me. “There were two other routes we didn’t know about until the day of or the day before, so we didn’t get a chance to really practice them. These were all things I’ve done before, little routes and things like that. Nothing too crazy.”
Last week, I asked Georgia quarterback Jake Fromm if he’d had any time to adapt to the new drills. Fromm told me that he found out about the new quarterback/receiver drills, such as the fade drill, when he arrived in Indianapolis.
More disconcerting for Moss was the timing of the drills. He had been training to run in the morning, as backs from previous combines would have done. Then Moss, Tooson, and Moss’ combine trainer, Travelle Gaines, discovered that the drills would take place hours later, without much of a plan for what was to happen through the rest of the day.
An NFL spokesperson told Touchdown Wire that the 32 NFL teams were informed of the changes to the scouting combine last Oct. 1. The spokesperson also said that the players are always able to move around and warm up at their own pace in Lucas Oil Stadium’s south end zone, which was explained by the group scouts directly to the players.
Perhaps that was the idea, but that wasn’t Moss’ experience.
“I knew it was going to be a prime-time type of thing, but we didn’t know exactly what time I was going to run,” Moss said. “It could have been 4, 6 or 8 p.m. I ended up running at 8 p.m., but we had to sit down — they had us out there [on the field at Lucas Oil Stadium] for about three hours, and we weren’t able to move around. We didn’t know that was going to be a part of it, and we didn’t know how much time we were going to have to warm up. We were all doing this night shift thing for the the first time, and there were a lot of unknown things that went into it.
“The combine is already long days. I was generally up from 6 a.m. until about 2 in the morning. I had two days when I could sleep in until about 7:45 or 8. You have long medicals and things like that, and the little free time you do have, you’re trying to train with your trainers. Then, when it gets to around midnight, you’re either getting a massage or trying to run extra 40s.”
The day Moss ran his drills, he woke up at 8:30, his second day with a late wake-up call. He underwent a standard NFL psychological evaluation an hour after that and had some downtime until he went to the stadium at 3 p.m. Moss and his running backs group took pictures at the stadium, and then waited until 7 p.m. to start warming up.
Moss had already strained his left hamstring during the vertical leap, at which point he texted Gaines, and Gaines said Moss should consider shutting it down. Moss bowed out of the broad jump because he wanted to be as ready as possible for his 40-yard dash, which he wasn’t forgoing. He ran a 4.65 40 and then participated in position drills.
“I wanted to run the 40, because I didn’t feel it was a very bad or severe tweak,” Moss said. “I felt like I’d been training for this the entire time, and I didn’t just want to pass up on it. I was rolling it out, and trying to get ready as much as I could, and it just didn’t do me any favors. I probably should have sat out, but me being me, I’m always going to try and compete to the best of my ability. I’m not going to make any excuses on anything regarding my performance, no matter what it is. I was able to do the running back drills, which was good for me, pretty much at full speed. I did the shuttle, which I shouldn’t have done, just because of the long day.”
For Gaines, it was now a balance between what he had shown Moss to do based on experiences at 13 previous combines with myriad prospects, and trying to make it all make sense in the moment.
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“There are no excuses, but I will say this: Zack was unbelievably consistent during training,” Gaines said. “He was running between 4.49 and 4.53, and we have the exact same timing system as they have in Indianapolis. So, what I think happened, and it’s something a lot of trainers are going to have to look at, is the new prime-time format. All these kids have been training in the mornings, and sitting around all day and running at night. … I don’t think his body responded to it.
“And it’s interesting, because the times were all over the place. Traditionally at the combine, they wake you up at 6 a.m., and you ran in the morning, so that’s how training was structured. And you have to understand — we didn’t find out [about the time change] until days before the combine. We didn’t find out about any of this new format — either the time change or the new drills. So if you’ve been doing your traditional combine training, you’re not prepared to run in the evening. There’s not a plan for that. Some kids, their bodies just weren’t ready for it, and I think that’s what happened with Zack.
“He got hurt doing the vertical jump. He texted me that he strained his left hamstring, and I said, ‘Look — you may want to shut it down.’ I thought it wasn’t worth it, but he wanted to compete. He’s a kid who … all his life, he dreamed of being at the combine. That was his whole goal. And I get it, but I don’t get it. He’s played hurt. He’s played through injuries. He’s just a tough kid. If it was a game, he was going to play. But when you’re running in that capacity, your body isn’t 100%. So, he decided to push through, and that’s what he did.
“Before, everybody would wake up at 6 in the morning, and get ready to run at 8. It was different now.”
Tooson was sitting in the stands at Lucas Oil Stadium, one seat over from an NFL head coach he’s known for years. And when Moss ran his 4.65, the coach turned to Tooson and said, “He’s not a speed guy, anyway. See you at his pro day.”
As for Moss, all he can do is look forward to that pro day on March 26. At the combine, Moss had formal interviews with the Rams, Packers, Chiefs, Bills, Chargers, Seahawks, Colts, Texans, Saints, Steelers, Cardinals and Lions. The Dolphins and Cardinals have requested private facility workouts, with more likely to come. If Moss runs 4.5 at his pro day, any questions will likely evaporate.
“I was definitely disappointed, because I hadn’t clocked that one time in training,” Moss said. “If I knew it was going to be that, I wouldn’t have run it, tweaked hamstring or not. It was definitely something I wasn’t proud of. But I’ve got another chance to go out there at my pro day and improve that time. The NFL wants to see certain things from me, and I’m a competitor. I’m not satisfied with my time, hamstring or not, and I’m definitely going to give it my best. I’m going to run that 4.5 like I know I can.”
Overall, Moss was happy with his experience in Indianapolis — more for what he got to go through than for the unfortunate time on the field.
“It was definitely a good experience,” Moss said. “When you grow up playing the game of football, this is one of the steps you look forward to. Being able to meet all these guys [general managers and coaches] that you’ve watched on TV, and you’re going into a rookie class, it was definitely cool. I went out of there wanting to improve a lot of things, but it was a great experience.”
Gaines, who has been doing this a long time, was less pleased, especially with the stealth nature of the drill changes — which nobody on his staff knew about until the Sunday before the combine, when everybody starts showing up in Indianapolis.
“Bert, one of our trainers, found out. And he told me, ‘Hey, Travelle — all those drills you’ve been teaching those guys? They’re now out,” Gaines said. “They’ve got a bunch of new drills.’ So, we tried to cram the guys through it, where they had been preparing for other things at other times. We even had what we called a ‘Combine Cheat Sheet’ — you wake up at 6 a.m. You take your creatine. You do this stretch and that stretch. And so, everything was different. With runners, everything is about timing.
“I mean, it is what it is, but I think it sucks. Because these kids in this combine class were the sacrificial lambs. Obviously now, training facilities will have to adjust. And we’ll go forward from there. And there’s no excuse going forward, but it’s called combine preparation for a reason! And we’re prepping the kids for what we’ve known for the last 25 years, and they changed it overnight. I didn’t know about it, and no trainer that I know knew about it. No agents we work with knew about it.”
It’s important to note that nobody interviewed for this article was interested in making excuses. Players, agents and trainers accepted the deviations in the nature of the event as they came and handled the situation as well as they could. The responsibility here is on the NFL, which unintentionally ran over an entire class of combine prospects to get its event to prime time without fully considering the ramifications of those deviations — or indeed, without informing those prospects that those deviations were coming.
If there’s one thing Zack Moss learned about the NFL that he needed to learn before he becomes a part of it, it’s that the NFL will at times sacrifice situational consistency for its players in the name of the broadcast dollar. And it will be on the NFL to make sure another combine class isn’t, as Gaines put it, the sacrificial lambs.
Touchdown Wire editor Doug Farrar previously covered football for Yahoo! Sports, Sports Illustrated, Bleacher Report, the Washington Post, and Football Outsiders. His first book, “The Genius of Desperation,” a schematic history of professional football, was published by Triumph Books in 2018 and won the Professional Football Researchers Association’s Nelson Ross Award for “Outstanding recent achievement in pro football research and historiography.”