Before he became the NFL’s leading rookie sensation, Kansas City Chiefs running back Kareem Hunt faced scouting report questions about his purportedly “average explosion” and “marginal downhill burst.” Though just a late third-round pick last April, Hunt has become the first player in league history to accrue at least 100 yards from scrimmage in each of his first six career games.
At least one service, however, never had any doubts about his underlying athleticism. With roughly 60 percent of NFL draftees having competed in high school track and field, the website Tracking Football has created a proprietary Player Athletic Index that takes a high school athlete’s height, weight, position and speed and power scores — as indicated by the objective data of their track and field results — to evaluate an athletic score that correlates to football success.
Tracking Football now has 44,000 players in its database, including every Football Bowl Subdivision (i.e. the former Division I-A) recruiting class since 2004. On this 0 to 5 scale, the average scholarship signee to a Power 5 conference school rates a 3.1; the average NFL draftee is a 3.8; the average All-Pro is a 4.2; and 94 percent of draft-eligible players with perfect 5.0 scores reach the NFL.
Hunt’s 100-meter time at Willoughby South (Ohio) High was a 10.8, better than 87 percent of athletes in the database, but even more impressive were his jumps: clearing 6-foot-8 in the high jump (better than 96 percent) and springing 23-foot-3 in the long jump (better than 93 percent). All that computed to a 4.7 PAI — and a 20.84 mile-per-hour max speed in Week 1, tops among all NFL ball carriers — making Hunt indicative of the kind of under-the-radar finds the staff at Tracking Football hopes will spark further interest in prospective college and NFL clients. So far, the company said 13 FBS schools subscribe, including Florida State, Michigan and Texas are past or present subscribers.
“What it allows them to do is get an assessment of what kind of a natural athlete the player was before they went to college and got the world-class training,” founder and CEO Mark Branstad said.
While serving as head track coach and assisting with the football team at Franklin (Ind.) Central High in the early 2000s, Branstad and one of the other football assistants, Brian Spilbeler, schemed of ways to attract more football players to the track team. Branstad began collecting examples of NFL Hall of Famers who participated in high school track, a hobby that turned into a devoted pursuit. He scoured the Internet, bought old college and NFL media guides on eBay and compiled a comprehensive database.
“We moved away from the anecdotal to the empirical,” he said.
Branstad has recruited an old high school football teammate, Aaron Hunter, who was a walk-on running back at Indiana and Spilbeler to the Tracking Football team. For the deep-seeded analytics, Branstand conferred with a business colleague of his father’s, a former Booz-Allen Hamilton consultant and Carnegie-Mellon MBA named Frank Bogaert, to develop the PAI. Hunter and Bogaert presented their findings at the 2017 MIT Sloan Sports Analytics Conference as one of eight selected companies in the Bootstrapped Track of the conference’s Startup Competition.
Had a great time presenting at @SloanSportsConf today. Also meeting many interesting people in the sports analytics industry. #SSAC17 pic.twitter.com/IBSQYeYs1F
— Tracking Football (@TrckFootball) March 3, 2017
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The motivation behind the heavy reliance on track-and-field data is twofold: one, the preponderance of football players who competed in that sport and, two, the objectivity of the data. A 100-meter time of 11.1 seconds — incidentally, the average for a wide receiver in FBS — is equivalent no matter the location, whereas the high school football competition level across districts and states varies widely.
“The reason we use track and field is it is objective,” Hunter said. “There’s no subjectivity to it, and it’s equivalent no matter where we do it. Our goal is not to do anything subjective or say, ‘I watched this kid. I think he’s got great heart, great hands, good feet.’ Our job is to say, ‘Hey, objectively speaking, he is a height/weight power freak.’
“We identify freaks through data, not subjectivity.”
Among the 5.0-scoring freaks are a host of names you’d expect — Bo Jackson, Julio Jones and Adrian Peterson — and some whose skills are latent. Former Purdue offensive lineman Jordan Roos was a national Junior Olympic shot put champion as a 15-year-old, then won four Texas high school state titles in shot put and discus but didn’t become a college starter until he was a redshirt sophomore. At Purdue’s Pro Day, he bench-pressed 225 pounds 41 times: six more than anyone at the NFL Combine, to which he was not invited. The Seattle Seahawks signed him as an undrafted free agent, and coach Pete Carroll has touted his significant potential.
As Hunter makes a point of noting, Tracking Football isn’t computing football scores but athleticism scores. And one revelation is just how common it is for elite football players to have participated in other sports in high school. Nearly 85 percent of NFL draftees were multi-sport athletes, and competition in sports other than track and field is given a small weight in the PAI score.
“There was this myth that specialization was becoming the norm for football players, and it’s just not true,” Hunter said.
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If someone encourages your child to specialize in a single sport, that person generally does not have your child's best interests in mind.
— JJ Watt (@JJWatt) March 7, 2017
Tracking Football is based in suburban Indianapolis, which is convenient for attending the NFL combine to pitch its wares. When first approaching an NFL scout a few years ago, there was some hesitation given the need to transpose high school data some three to five years in the future for the pro draft, not to mention a prevailing narrative that track speed and football speed are different, Branstad said, while stressing the value in assessing natural athleticism and certain event-specific correlations: like with Roos, the shot put and discuss can indicate a lineman’s athleticism. (Houston Texas star defensive end J.J. Watt was a Wisconsin state shot put champion in high school and had a 4.1 PAI.) The jumping events show the explosiveness necessary for defensive backs and wide receivers.
While a few NFL scouts independently use Tracking Football, the company is still courting teams as full-fledged clients, and the appeal is more obvious and linear for college programs. Branstad is optimistic about doubling its client base by this time next year and thankful that collecting information is now much easier. (High school athletes, parents and coaches are never charged for using the site or having their entries listed.) Some colleges have indicated that they use Tracking Football as a helpful winnowing filter to identify recruits whose highlight video they need to watch; others have said they use it as a narrowing tool near the end of the recruiting process.
As one college coach told Hunter, “What I like about you guys is, I don’t miss on athleticism. I can focus on the other stuff.”