Big news for the 2024 NFL Draft cycle. Though announced last year, the Big 12 Conference officially won’t hold individual Pro Days at each school in 2024. Instead, they’ll be replaced by a mini-combine that will take place across several days in late March.
Sportskeeda’s draft analyst Tony Pauline tweeted the news and schedule Tuesday afternoon.
— Tony Pauline (@TonyPauline) February 20, 2024
The first group, offensive skill players and defensive backs, will arrive on March 27 with the initial day of testing coming bright and early on the 28th. A second group, the trenches and linebackers, will fly in on the 29th with their workouts occurring the following day.
The Big 12 first announced the news last March and this could potentially be the start of a major shift in the scouting process. Instead of teams spreading their scouts thin across different schools, all the top prospects will be at one location. Essentially another version of the combine a month after the official event. Some of the top Big 12 prospects include Oklahoma OT Tyler Guyton, Texas DL T’Vondre Sweat, Iowa State CB T.J. Tampa, and Houston OT Patrick Paul.
If this design is well-received by players and NFL teams, it could cause conferences to shift to this model across college football. This setup has plenty of benefits though it does come with drawbacks. It’ll be harder for teams like the Steelers to hold Pro Day dinners with prospects, something Mike Tomlin is a big fan of. He will have to be far more selective with whom he gets to spend off-field time.
And for us, it will be much tougher to play “Blue’s Clues” of where the Steelers are sending their people since they will all be at one location. We’ll still learn some information, especially when it comes to positional coaches, and we’ll see how this event impacts the rest of the Pro Day schedule. Will coaches and GMs miss other key Pro Days to attend these workouts? The Pro Day schedule winds down at the end of March but last year, there were still several key workouts over this time frame. Perhaps the rest of the college football world will work around it to avoid a serious conflict.
