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

If I had you guess at which positions athleticism matters most in the NFL, what would you guess?

Cornerback? Edge? Potentially running back?

They're all valid guesses, and a lot of the studs at those positions are workout warriors.

You should move tight end up that list.

We're going to dig into how much the combine matters at tight end here. And as you'll see, the workout most highly correlated to success in the NFL -- among any workout at any position -- is in this group.

To measure this, we're looking at tight ends 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 fifth-year option for a first-rounder).

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 Tight Ends 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.

The table below shows this for tight ends. The raw column is the straight-up output for the player, and the weight-adjusted one accounts for the player's weight at the combine.

That R-squared value of 0.156 for the weight-adjusted 40-yard dash is the highest of any position across the six workouts. Hot dang.

This isn't to overlook the 3-cone score, either. While it's nothing earth-shattering, that number is still high enough for it to be a data point we value as these guys work out.

The other route to measuring this is looking at top tight ends and seeing what kind of workouts they put up.

The table below looks at the 21 tight ends of this group who posted at least 15 AV across their first four years in the league. The average percentile here is among all tight ends to do that workout at the combine from 2010 to 2021. These percentiles are based on the weight-adjusted metric for each workout.

For context, when we did this same process at receiver, no workout saw the quality players at the position rank higher than the 64th percentile on average. At tight end, three workouts cleared that benchmark. Both the 40-yard dash and broad jump were higher than any of the marks at quarterback and running back, as well.

Each of the top six tight ends by this measure were in at least the 80th percentile of the 40-yard dash. Of our 18 biggest hits who ran the 40, only Zach Ertz (44th) and Jordan Reed (27th) were below the 60th percentile in that workout.

The broad jump mark comes from having 4 of the 13 players in our group who did the workout ranking in at least the 95th percentile. There were more poor performances here than in the 40, but having a good broad jump does seem to be a plus. It could have helped put the league on George Kittle, who ranks in the 98th percentile for the broad jump and 92nd in the 40.

If you're looking for benchmarks at the combine, for a tight end weighing 250 pounds, in order to rank in the 75th percentile, he'd need:

• Roughly a 4.65-second 40
• A broad jump at or above 10 feet

It certainly doesn't guarantee success; no single workout does. But it should at least get our attention.

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