Don’t tell Merrill Hoge about someone’s vertical. Don’t email him a broad jump. And have mercy on your soul if you bring up bench press reps. For Hoge, the way to evaluate a player is by turning on the tape.
Joining 102.5 DVE’s Randy Baumann Thursday morning, Hoge discussed the right way to evaluate a prospect. And the wrong way.
“I don’t care about the broad jump,” Hoge said. “There’s so many stupid events at that Combine. I can’t even begin. Just tell me this…tell me what offensive play starts with an offensive lineman on their back?”
He’s referring to one of the positional drills offensive linemen do at the Combine. Laying face down, they get to their feet and follow the coaches instructions, changing directions and moving forward and backward. Here’s an example of what it looks like.
On the surface, it looks silly and non-translatable. But the point is not to mimic something on the football field. It’s a way to measure athleticism relative to their peers. How flexible each player is, how well they move laterally, how they can sink and change directions. Theses are skillsets that translate into being a good offensive lineman. There’s a reason why o-line coaches still run it, this particular drill led by former Steelers’ assistant o-line coach Chris Morgan.
Hoge says the tape tells the story.
“There’s two types of evaluators. There’s football evaluators and then there’s measurable evaluators. And you can always tell the measurable evaluators. They never talk about skillsets. They’ll talk about yards, speed, height, weight…I would rather have a football evaluator versus an evaluator from a statistical perspective.”
Of course, Hoge isn’t off base here. Tape should rule any evaluation. We study and use the tape as much as anyone in the roughly 300 scouting reports we’ll produce by draft day, each report full of clips and notes of games watched for each prospect. But there is a marriage. There is value in the stats, a way to eliminate the “noise” the tape can’t account for like level of competition. A broad jump is a broad jump for each player. And using the data to examine historical trends can help identify those who will succeed. And who won’t.
Hoge wouldn’t eliminate all testing, but he’d do it in a different way.
“Here’s what we’d do. We’d get rid of that stupid bench and we’d do squats, okay? We’d do 225 [pound] squats. Then we’ll see something. Then we’ll have something that correlates something.”
Hoge served as a Steelers’ assistant scout for a brief time but is no longer in that role. If he ever gets back into scouting, you know where to find him. In front of the film projector, not the computer.
