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

When Kyle Hamilton ran a 4.59 40-yard dash at the combine in 2022, it tossed some cold water on enthusiasm around him as an NFL prospect.

Hamilton entered the draft as the fourth-ranked player on Arif Hasan's consensus big board at The Athletic. But he slipped outside the top 10, falling to 14. There, the Baltimore Ravens traded up to select him. Obviously, the 40 time isn't the primary reason he dropped; positional value likely played a bigger role. But it certainly didn't help matters.

Hamilton has since turned into one of the league's standout safeties, earning a first-team All-Pro nod in 2023 and a second-team honor in 2024. The Ravens' bet on the player over the measurables paid off.

Is that typical for safeties, though? Or is Hamilton an outlier, able to overcome a slower 40 time?

We'll dig into that today, looking at safeties at the combine from 2010 to 2021 (giving them at least four years in the league). We'll take their workouts in Pro Football Reference's database and compare them to the Approximate Value (AV, PFR's attempt to quantify the value a player provides to his team) for each player across his first four years in the league, the length of a rookie contract (minus the option for a first-rounder). This means Hamilton won't yet be included as we have just three years of data on him, but this is still a sample of 176 other safeties from which we can draw conclusions.

This isn't a perfect exercise. AV is better at tracking who was on the field than who excelled, and not every player does every workout. Some don't do any. Still, it can at least give us a ballpark of which workouts we should emphasize (or not).

Key Workouts for Safeties at the NFL Draft Combine

There are two routes to examining this, and we'll go through both today.

First, we'll just look at the R-squared value between each player's workout metrics and his AV across the first four seasons. R-squared measures the predictiveness of data points with zero being no relationship and one being a perfect correlation.

This table shows that for safeties. The raw column is their workout straight up while the weight-adjusted column accounts for the player's weight at the combine.

Despite the Hamilton example, these numbers aren't trivial. Safety is one of only two positions (edge being the other) with three workouts holding an R-squared value of at least 0.100. None of them were earth-shattering, but 40 time, 3-cone, and shuttle all had at least some predictiveness of NFL production.

The other way to measure this is looking at the position's studs and seeing how they measured up at the combine.

This table shows the average percentile rank in each workout of the 31 safeties to produce at least 20 AV across their first four seasons from 2010 to 2021. The percentile is relative to all safeties to do that workout at the combine in this span. Due to the numbers in the table above, the 40 time and broad jump are raw numbers rather than adjusted for weight; the others are the weight-adjusted metrics.

For the 40 time, the better safeties generally were on the faster end of the spectrum. Of the 27 safeties to reach 20 AV who ran the 40, 7 were in at least the 90th percentile. Only Kendrick Lewis was below the 25th percentile, and he checked in at exactly 20 AV.

Plus, for what it's worth, Hamilton's 40 time would have ranked in the 35th percentile. It's not as if he was a slug; he just wasn't a standout.

So, of the workouts for safety, 40 time is the one we can put the most stock into for finding high-end players.

For 3-cone and shuttle, it's more about hitting a threshold. Of 23 players below the 25th percentile in the 3-cone, only 7 produced more than 0 AV. That number is 10 of 25 for the shuttle. There are exceptions -- Kam Chancellor's combine was particularly uninspiring -- but it should raise a red flag for us if a player is an outlier in the negative sense.

That seems to be the broad takeaway here. We don't want to cross off players like Hamilton or Chancellor if they have a poor combine. Tons of other things go into being a great safety. But athleticism does matter here, so we shouldn't ignore the combine entirely.

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