Which Workouts Matter Most for Quarterbacks at the NFL Draft Scouting Combine?

When it comes to the NFL Draft Scouting Combine, it's easy to write off workouts for quarterbacks.

After all, we tend to hear that the interviews with teams matter most at that position, something we can't quantify or know how they went. And that's likely true, given how cerebral the position is.

But are there any workouts that actually do matter when trying to predict who will be good at the next level?

In order to answer that, I looked at each quarterback's combine metrics from 2010 through 2021 (meaning we'd have at least four seasons post-draft for each player). Then, I compared that with the Approximate Value (AV, a stat from Pro Football Reference uses to quantify a player's value to the team) they produced across their first four seasons. This is the length of a rookie contract (outside of the fifth year option for a first-rounder), so it can give us a glimpse at who excelled in the NFL from the jump.

Obviously, there are flaws here. AV does a better job of telling us who saw playing time than who was elite. Additionally, not every player does every workout, and many skip them all together, especially if they're projected to go early.

Still, you have to be some level of competent to earn said playing time, and we do have plenty of workout data to look at. For example, of the 202 quarterbacks in this sample, 186 of them have 40-yard dash times in PFR's database. Thus, while this is imperfect, we can at least likely learn something.

Let's dig into some of the key takeaways here.

Key Workouts for Quarterbacks at the NFL Draft Combine

There are two separate ways to look into this, and we'll tackle both today.

First, we can simply compare each player's AV to his performance in each workout. We can do this by looking at the R-squared value between the two numbers. R-squared basically tells us how predictive an input is of the output with zero being no relationship and one being a perfect correlation.

The table below shows these R-squared values for five of the six workouts in PFR's database (I skipped bench as so few quarterbacks have participated). The raw number on the left is just the player's workout number straight up, and the weight-adjusted metric is taking that workout and adjusting it for the player's weight at the combine.

As you can see, the weight-adjusted metrics perform better than the raw numbers in each category except the broad jump. Thus, we should account for that when analyzing results.

Overall, none of these workouts has a super tight relationship with production at the NFL level. This makes sense, given how many other factors come into play at the position.

Still, the 40-yard dash number is noteworthy. The weight-adjusted 40-time for quarterbacks had a higher R-squared value with the first four years of production than at wide receiver, interior offensive line, and interior defensive line. It's not nothing, and it was the workout that stood out most for quarterbacks.

The other way to analyze this is taking the most productive quarterbacks in this span and seeing what kind of numbers they put up.

The table below illustrates this, showing the average percentile rank in each workout for the 24 quarterbacks to produce at least 40 AV in their first four years of this sample. The workouts looked at here were the weight-adjusted metrics, and the percentiles are relative to other quarterbacks at the combine in this span.

The takeaways here are a bit different than in the initial overview.

The importance of the 3-cone is interesting. Of the 16 quarterbacks in our group with a 3-cone time, only two (Jared Goff and Jameis Winston) were below the 50th percentile. Nobody was lower than the 28th percentile.

The broad jump also got a boost here. Five of the 18 quarterbacks in our sample ranked in the 90th percentile here with two of them -- Cam Newton and Jalen Hurts -- in the 95th or higher. You did have some lower-end numbers (Winston was in the eighth percentile), but a lot of our standouts came through.

If you're looking for benchmarks when watching the combine, in order to rank in the 70th percentile of our three key workouts, a 220-pound quarterback would need:

• Roughly a 4.71-second 40-yard dash
• A broad jump in the 115- or 116-inch range, or 9 feet and 7 or 8 inches
• A 3-cone at 6.99 or 7.00 seconds

Again, this is far from a requirement. Athleticism isn't the number one trait at the position. But that's the approximate range where past successful quarterbacks have checked in, giving us some sort of benchmark when analyzing the data.

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