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

Of all positions in the NFL, wide receiver is the toughest to analyze from an athleticism perspective.

Successful receivers come in all shapes and sizes. It's frankly bizarre that D.K. Metcalf and Zay Flowers can play the same position and both be home runs despite a 46-pound, 7-inch gap between the two of them.

Plus, depending on what type of receiver you are, you may need to excel at a different skill. Someone like Metcalf benefits from running fast in a straight line while slot guys benefit more from short-area burst and change of direction.

Still, we can at least dig in and see which workouts at the NFL Draft Scouting Combine have correlated best to success in the NFL.

We'll do that today, looking at receivers 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 Wide Receivers 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.

In this table are both each player's raw workout score and one that adjusts for the weight he posted at the combine.

These numbers are low across the board. For context, the R-squared between a quarterback's weight-adjusted 40 time and his AV across the first four years was 0.097. It was almost half that at receiver, and that was the best workout for the position.

This should be our primary takeaway: there is no one workout metric that will tell the tale at receiver. Thus, all combine data should be taken with a grain of salt.

The other route we can use to measure this is by looking at standout players and seeing what kinds of metrics they posted.

The table below shows the average percentile rank of the 46 receivers to post at least 25 AV across their first four seasons. The percentile is where players in this group who did that workout ranked on average relative to other receivers at the combine in this span. These are all the weight-adjusted version of each metric.

Again, 40-yard dash stands out most, followed by the shuttle. But the results are still fully mixed.

Anecdotally, it seems like the better approach is to value different workouts depending on what kind of player they are. If they're primarily running vertical routes, their 40 time will matter more. Metcalf, Julio Jones, Terry McLaurin, and Ja'Marr Chase were all in at least the 95th percentile here (though Chase was also in the 95th percentile in the vertical, broad jump, and shuttle. He's not human, even if those numbers were from LSU's pro day due to COVID modifications.).

Cooks also excelled in the shuttle (he actually has the best weight-adjusted and raw mark), as did Odell Beckham, Amari Cooper, Allen Robinson, and Chris Godwin.

Thus, rather than emphasizing one workout for all receivers, we should base it off of how that player projects to win at the NFL level. The shuttle seems best for players who thrive via elite route-running while the 40 is key for guys who need to get downfield in a hurry.

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