Written By Arif Hasan (ColdOmaha.com)
Photo Credit: Kyle Hansen
Happy Fourth of July! Celebrating with fireworks, hot dogs, and beer is traditional Independence Day stuff, and nothing is more American than celebrating by blowing stuff up.
But I cover the Vikings, and the first thing I think of when I hear “explosiveness” is explosion off the line of scrimmage. With that in mind, can we quantify who the most explosive players on the roster are?
It’s always inexact, but we can at least look at the best measures of explosiveness we have at our disposal and apply them to the 90-man (or rather, 88-man) roster the Vikings are currently slated to carry into camp.
I took every NFL player’s vertical leap and broad jump scores, and created an “expected score” for all players for each of those combine metrics based on their height and weight.
We know that jumping 37 inches high in the vert is more impressive at 280 pounds than it is at 185 pounds, but we needed a way to compare a 36-inch jump at 225 pounds to a 37-inch jump at 210 pounds.
After finding “expected” scores for all the heights and weights, I subtracted the actual score a player put up against his expected score and standardized those to all the other combine scores (one inch over expectation is different in the vertical leap than it is in the broad jump). The players with the highest standardized score in both the broad jump and vertical are the most explosive players.
But we had to account for age, too. Danielle Hunter performed his combine at 20 years old, when he wouldn’t produce his best possible scores. Terence Newman killed the combine when he performed, but he’s 37 years old now—not nearly the athlete he once was.
So, I used a model from a study that looked at how sprinters age over the course of their life, and made it more aggressive to account for the fact that football skills atrophy quicker and explosiveness in particular declines faster than long speed.
It’s a rough model, but it should give us what we want.
With all that in mind, let’s look at the ten most explosive players on the roster, as well as some near-misses.
Click here to view the list.