The New York Giants have drafted highly athletic players in recent years and were looking for that trend to continue here in 2020, which featured a draft class of tackle Andrew Thomas, safety Xavier McKinney, cornerback Darnay Holmes and others.
But just how athletic are some of those players based on Relative Athletic Scores? Well, let’s first begin with an explanation of RAS courtesy of Pro Football Network.
Relative Athletic Scores, or RAS, compares player athletic testing to all players at that position with a vast database spanning more than 30 years. It then uses those scores to create a composite final score on a scale of 0.00 to 10.00, with 5.00 being the median score. Using RAS, we’re going to look at four division rivals and identify how much athletic testing has played into their draft process in the early rounds.
Over the past five years, the Giants have selected 17 players with an RAS of 8.0 or above, 11 with an RAS between 5.0 and 7.9, and six with an RAS of 4.9 or below.
What may interest some Giants fans is that the player with the highest RAS since 2018 is linebacker Lorenzo Carter, who scored a perfect 10.0. Comparatively, the player with the lowest RAS since 2018 is cornerback DeAndre Baker, who scored a 4.58.
So what about the Giants’ 2020 class? Only one player had an RAS below 5.0 and that was cornerback Darnay Holmes, who earned a score of 3.67. And the player who earned the highest RAS was linebacker Carter Coughlin, a seventh round pick, who earned a score of 9.8.
Meanwhile, offensive tackle Andrew Thomas, the team’s first round pick, earned an RAS of 8.11.
The team didn’t waver from their normal approach in 2019, taking yet another top tier athletic talent in Andrew Thomas. With excellent timed and explosion drills, the team continues to add to an athletic front, trying to keep pace with the Eagles and Cowboys who have always been a bit ahead in that regard. They would bookend that selection with Matthew Peart, another elite athlete at tackle, in the third round.
Safety Xavier McKinney, the Giants’ second round pick, earned the second-lowest RAS of their class with a 5.86.
Sandwiched between the tackle picks was Alabama safety Xavier McKinney. Once considered a sure-fire top-10 talent, concerns about top-end speed got a bit louder by the time the draft began. McKinney fell to the second round before the Giants grabbed him at 36th overall. The speed concerns some had raised on tape showed up in his testing, but his explosion drills are very good for a safety. At his position, if you’re not fast, you want to be explosive and that’s a trait that McKinney brings to the table.
Some of the remaining draft class stacks up as follows:
- OT Matt Peart, 9.04
- OL Shane Lemieux, 6.64
- LB Cam Brown, 6.05
Linebacker T.J Brunson, cornerback Chris Williamson and linebacker Tae Crowder were not given RAS scores.
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