Changes in the Athletic Profile of Elite College American Football Players
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The purpose of this study was to compare positional anthropometric and National Football League (NFL) Combine performance levels in elite college American football players over the 3-year period from 1999 to 2001 to the 3-year period from 2008 to 2010. The sample included 15 offensive and defensive positions, and only those players invited to the combine and subsequently drafted in the same year (n = 1,712) were included in the study. Data from 10 combine physical tests were examined, including weight; height; the 9.1-, 18.3-, and 36.6-m sprints; the vertical and horizontal jumps; the 18.3-m shuttle run; the 3-cone drill; and the 102.1-kg bench press for maximum repetitions. Independent samples t-tests detected differences for each of the 15 positions (p < 0.05). There were no discernible trends in height and weight over the period in question, whereas players in the more recent group significantly improved performance in straight sprinting, the 3-cone drill, and the horizontal jump. Findings suggest that these tests better reflect characteristics such as explosiveness and first-step quickness as compared with the 18.3-m shuttle and the vertical jump, and that such characteristics have become more highly sought after by NFL coaches and scouts. The results of the present research suggest that the position-specific profiles changed over a relatively short period of time. Coaches and practitioners will be able to use the findings of this research to better prepare athletes for entry into the NFL.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.003 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".