Key takeaways
- The combine is a four-day, invitation-only evaluation event: NFL Football Operations describes roughly 300 draft-eligible college players being invited each year for medical, mental and physical assessment.
- The physical battery reported in the research literature includes the 10-, 20- and 40-yard dashes, bench press, vertical jump, broad jump, 20- and 60-yard shuttles and the three-cone drill, alongside an aptitude test.
- Medical work and interviews take up as much of the schedule as the drills - each of the 32 clubs may conduct up to sixty fifteen-minute interviews with prospects.
- A 2008 study in the Journal of Strength and Conditioning Research found no consistent statistical relationship between combine tests and later professional performance for quarterbacks, running backs and wide receivers drafted between 1999 and 2004, with sprint tests for running backs the notable exception.
- A 2010 study of 1,155 drafted players found combine physical test performance had little association with draft order whether the data were normalised or not, though sprint time and jumping ability appeared to carry the most weight with decision-makers.
A scouting combine is the stage of a football career that decides where a player is picked, and it is not the stage that decides how good the player is. Those two sentences are the whole argument, and the published research supports both halves of it more clearly than the annual coverage suggests.
This article covers what the event consists of, what the tests are, and what studies have found when they checked whether the tests do the job people assume.
What the event actually is
NFL Football Operations describes the combine — formally the National Invitational Camp — as a four-day, invitation-only event at which scouts evaluate draft-eligible college players on medical, mental and physical criteria. Roughly 300 players are invited each year.
The public image is a stopwatch at the end of a 40-yard sprint. The schedule is mostly not that:
- Medical examinations, which are extensive and coordinated through a hospital partner. The scale is genuinely large; the president of the organisation that runs the event has described 365 MRIs being performed on 333 players across four days in 2013, each scan taking about an hour.
- Interviews. Each of the 32 clubs may conduct up to sixty fifteen-minute interviews with prospects. Sixty per club is a substantial share of the entire invited field.
- Psychological and aptitude testing.
- Measurements — height, weight, arm length, hand size — taken under standard conditions rather than reported by a college programme.
- On-field testing, the part that is televised.
For many players the medical is the single most consequential item, because an examination can reveal something that changes a club's valuation far more than a tenth of a second does. The event is often described as a four-day job interview, which is closer to the truth than "a track meet".
The battery
The physical tests examined in the research literature on the event are:
| Test | What it is meant to capture |
|---|---|
| 10-, 20- and 40-yard dashes | Acceleration over short distance and straight-line speed |
| Bench press | Repetition strength at a fixed load |
| Vertical jump | Lower-body explosive power |
| Broad jump | Horizontal explosive power |
| 20- and 60-yard shuttles | Change of direction and short-area agility |
| Three-cone drill | Change of direction with a turn under control |
| Aptitude test | Cognitive processing under time constraint |
That table is the standard battery as recorded in the studies discussed below; the event has added and revised drills over time, including new movement drills trialled at international combine events before appearing at the main one.
Position-specific on-field work sits alongside the battery, which is where a quarterback throws, a receiver runs routes and a lineman is tested on footwork.
What the research found
Two studies in the Journal of Strength and Conditioning Research are the ones worth knowing, because they ask the two different questions people conflate.
Does the combine predict professional performance? Kuzmits and Adams examined players drafted at three offensive positions — quarterback, running back and wide receiver — over the 1999 to 2004 period, correlating combine measures against ten performance criteria including draft order, three years each of salary and games played, and position-specific production. They report no consistent statistical relationship between combine tests and professional football performance, with the notable exception of sprint tests for running backs. The authors go on to question the overall usefulness of the event's physical component and suggest more rigorous psychological testing and the use of collegiate performance as a job sample.
Does the combine predict where a player is drafted? Robbins examined 1,155 players invited to the combine and drafted in the same year between 2005 and 2009, across 17 positions, testing raw data and two forms of normalisation. The primary finding was that performance in the physical test battery, normalised or not, had little association with draft success — and normalising provided no advantage over raw data. Of the eight measures examined, straight sprint time and jumping ability appeared to hold the most weight with the personnel responsible for draft decisions. The paper suggests the test battery could be revised to reflect the characteristics clubs actually value, and advises players to develop mental and technical skills alongside physical ones.
Read together, the picture is not "the combine is meaningless". It is narrower and more interesting: the tests influence decisions more than they forecast careers, and the specific tests that influence decisions are the sprint and the jumps.
What that means for a prospect
If you are reasoning about the event — or about a simulated version of it — the implications are fairly direct.
Train the tests that move the decision, not the ones that feel athletic. Sprint time and jumping ability are the measures the evidence associates with decision-makers' weighting. The bench press is an inconsistent predictor of almost everything.
Treat the medical as the main event. It is the item most capable of moving a valuation sharply in either direction, and it is the one least amenable to preparation in the final month.
Do not treat the interview as a formality. Sixty interviews per club is a system designed to gather non-physical information, and the research keeps pointing at non-physical factors as the place the missing predictive power might live.
Understand that stock and quality are separate variables. A player can improve their draft position without improving as a player, and an evaluation system where that is possible will reward preparing specifically for the evaluation.
That last point is exactly the tension a draft board has to resolve, and what makes a good draft board covers how to keep a testing number in proportion against tape and production. How draft order works explains the machinery that turns a board into picks.
Where the combine sits in a career simulation
Football Career Sim 2026, which Reign Creative built, models a career in stages: youth football, high school, college, the combine and the draft, then professional seasons, playoffs, awards and retirement. The combine is a distinct stage with its own preparation rather than a cutscene between college and the draft.
Designing it that way is a defensible reading of the evidence above. The combine stage in a career game should feel like a period where you can change where you are picked — and where the thing you changed is not the same as the thing that will decide whether the career works. That gap is the interesting part of the stage, and it is also, judging by the published research, the accurate one.
Our guide to playing a quarterback career covers the stages either side of it, and the broader sports career and GM articles set the career-mode model against the general-manager one. As with everything in the app, the leagues, teams and players are fictional and the game is not affiliated with or licensed by any real league, club or athlete; the evaluation process it models is real, which is why it is worth understanding properly.
Good to know
Frequently asked questions
What actually happens at a scouting combine?
Which drills make up the testing battery?
Do combine results predict professional performance?
If the tests do not predict performance, why do they still matter?
Sources
- NFL Scouting Combine (opens in a new tab)NFL Football Operations — accessed
- The NFL combine: does it predict performance in the National Football League? (opens in a new tab)Journal of Strength and Conditioning Research (via PubMed) — accessed
- The National Football League (NFL) combine: does normalized data better predict performance in the NFL draft? (opens in a new tab)Journal of Strength and Conditioning Research (via PubMed) — accessed
League, team and athlete names appear here only to identify the rules, records and history being discussed. Reign Creative LLC's sports games are not affiliated with, endorsed by or licensed by any league, team, players' association or athlete, and all names and marks belong to their owners.
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