PHOENIX — During a typical February day, the latest college football stars were training for the most important job interviews of their lives. The prospects, clad in the gear of top colleges or agencies, had gathered at Exos, a high-end athletic performance center, to prepare for the NFL combine, the week-long event in Indianapolis where franchises probe, measure and evaluate their brains and bodies.
In the palatial facility, Ohio State wide receiver Garrett Wilson, Georgia defensive tackle Devonte Wyatt and 52 other prospects clustered around gym equipment, massage tables, recovery tubs, meeting rooms and dining tables. Some agents and entourages stopped by. In the eight-week lead-up to the combine, which can greatly influence a prospect’s NFL career, the vibe at Exos was that of an exclusive, high-stakes summer camp for men in their early 20s who have action-figure physiques.
In the past decade or so, the niche world of combine training has exploded along with the NFL’s draft boom. In the early 2000s, a few top players trained at their schools before the combine, but agents gradually began using fancy, high-price facilities to negotiate against one another — and prospects came to expect it.
Advertisement
Now nearly every draftable player does some form of combine training. What was once a luxury expense offered by some of the biggest agents has become just the cost of doing business. Before players earn a dime as a professional, many agents send their clients around the country and pay for housing, a rental car and a stipend.
The lowest-rated players cost agents about $10,000 before the draft, according to estimates provided by three agents, while top prospects can run factors more. Exos alone charges $15,000 to $25,000 per player.
During this brief purgatory for players, the training facilities become makeshift teams. One recent day at Exos, Oklahoma State linebacker Malcolm Rodriguez stepped up to practice the broad jump after landing short of his goal a few times. Georgia defensive tackle Jordan Davis — a 6-foot-6, 340-pound mauler projected to go in the first round — shouted encouragement.
Advertisement
“You are kind! You are strong! You are loved!” Davis bellowed.
By now, there are about a dozen major facilities across the country specializing in combine training, including XPE, Michael Johnson Performance and TEST Football Academy, which has this year’s potential top quarterback, Kenny Pickett. But the biggest operation — by far — is Exos.
Since 1999, when former college strength coach Mark Verstegen founded Athletes’ Performance (which later rebranded as Exos), the company says it has trained 1,085 drafted players, including seven No. 1 picks. It regularly has about half of the players picked in the top 100. Across its four facilities — in Phoenix; Frisco, Tex.; Gulf Breeze, Fla.; and Carlsbad, Calif. — it has 174 players and 39 percent of all the prospects invited to the combine, which begins this week.
In the past, players saw agents as key to improving their draft stock because they had relationships with trainers, scouts and NFL executives. But players now can bypass agents and develop relationships with trainers.
Advertisement
“Back in the day, we would just link up with agents and they would just send us who they sign,” said Pete Bommarito of Bommarito Performance Systems, which has 25 combine invitees this year. “Now we got to recruit as hard as the agents got to recruit. The evolution of social media, especially Instagram, has been a godsend for us.”
The quantifiable results, the rapport built by daily training and the relatively boilerplate structure of most rookie contracts have helped shift the allegiances of prospects. Some are closer to the trainers who help prep them for the combine than the agents who will negotiate their first contract.
“It would be an oversimplification, but not a huge one, to say agents are seen as a vehicle to pay for high-end trainers, especially for players toward the end of Day 2 and across Day 3 [of the draft],” Neil Stratton of Inside the League, a consulting firm for agents and scouts, wrote in an email.
Critics of the combine argue that, as player-tracking data becomes more widespread in college, teams should value interviews and medical evaluations more than the basic athletic events, such as the 40-yard dash and bench press. Exos also prepares prospects for the nontelevised parts of the combine — former Tampa Bay Buccaneers general manager Mark Dominik conducts interviews, for example, and physical therapists address lingering injuries — but a poor result in the 40 or bench press can cause a player to fall in the draft, costing him hundreds of thousands of dollars, if not millions.
Advertisement
So high-end facilities such as Exos focus less on football than the highly specific combine drills that could help secure a spot on an NFL team.
“Those are the tests that you need to go do and prepare for to get drafted,” Exos trainer Nic Hill said. “The reality is it does help guys and it hurts guys.”
Chasing numbers
To show how intensive the combine training is and to avoid sharing sensitive medical data of prospects ahead of the draft, Exos allowed this reporter to go through its intake evaluation. The first step was a dual-energy X-ray absorptiometry (DXA) scan to determine my body-fat percentage and whether any limbs were worryingly asymmetrical.
I then underwent a physical-therapy assessment to discover movement weaknesses (there were several) and a nutrition consult to build a meal plan for fat loss (a baseline of 1,800 calories per day, about 30 percent protein with varying carbs and fat). I squeezed a NordBord with my knees to test hamstring health, jumped on force plates to set a max-power threshold (24.4 Newtons per kilogram) and pricked my finger for a blood sample that evaluated my gut health.
Exos uses these baseline measurements to tailor its program to each athlete. Almost always, players arrive with a goal weight recommended by an agent to address concerns of NFL scouts. Skill players trying to shed fat can eat as few as 3,000 calories per day, while linemen bulking up can devour as many as 10,000. But every player wants to “lean out,” Hill said, because “fat doesn’t fly.”
Advertisement
Goal weight is often the first piece of data in a process that contains overwhelming amounts of it. In a typical program, players hear plenty of statistics, including body-fat ratios, 40-yard dash times and bench-press reps at 225 pounds. Yet chasing numbers can be counterproductive.
One example: Shannon Ehrhardt, a nutritionist, has worked with some athletes who don’t follow the meal plan in pursuit of a lower body-fat percentage.
“They’re getting salads every day, and coaches are telling me, ‘Man, his energy’s really low; he’s not [breaking personal records],’” Ehrhardt said. “But we do a body [composition test], and he’s at 4 percent, and he’s happy about 4 percent.”
In the digital age, when a trove of personal data is available to anyone at any time, the artistry of trainers is to get each athlete to focus on and produce the right numbers. Amanda Carlson-Phillips, senior vice president and head of performance innovation, said using numbers to create insight, not new data points, is the future of athletic training.
Exos has streamlined its program to produce results, which meant reducing the number of sessions per week and sacrificing workouts that were once staples. The company did so while some of the program’s practitioners harbored skepticism about the value of combine numbers.
Advertisement
Hill pointed to Las Vegas Raiders slot receiver Hunter Renfrow, one of the league’s best. The national champion at Clemson fell to the fifth round of the 2019 draft in part because he ran the seventh-slowest 40 among wide receivers (4.59 seconds).
“The conversation of whether [combine testing] translates or not is the job of the GM and the coaches, not me,” Hill said. “My job is to get you ready and to perform as best as possible.”
One afternoon, Tennessee offensive lineman Cade Mays complained that the broad jump had nothing to do with blocking. “I’m not doing this [expletive] at the combine,” he muttered. Barlow turned to the other linemen and said that if they were bad at certain events they should train just enough to avoid being outliers, which in this case meant jumping between eight and nine feet.
Advertisement
“Check the box and keep it moving,” he said.
After collecting a dizzying amount of data, the Exos team shuttled me along its performance assembly line of mind-set, nutrition, movement and recovery. Before workouts, an employee at the Fuel Bar handed me a drink of fermented beet and two beta-alanine pills, which “buffer the burn” and allowed me to train harder and get better results. Afterward, dinner awaited in the kitchen.
During the sessions, JP Major, a trainer, and Tommy Brice, a physical therapist, worked in concert to evaluate my body. They identified several issues, particularly my tendency to compensate for my right leg’s weakness by opening my hips or bending my knee, that they would correct and fortify if I were a prospect.
One morning after a workout, I sat next to Oregon offensive lineman George Moore. He hadn’t been invited to the combine and was training for his pro day. He had concentrated on his upper-body strength, a worry of scouts, and nearly doubled his bench press reps in seven weeks.
Advertisement
“I never thought it would be like this,” he said. “In college, they just lift to lift — to get bigger, faster, stronger. But people don’t need that necessarily.”
“I kind of feel like a robot,” I told Moore.
He nodded, then added, “It’s hard to not have success here if you follow the plan.”
Rising stock
Ten days before the start of the combine, prospects filtered into Exos for “Big Bench Saturday.” Trainers tell players that not only is the bench press one of the most important physical tests of the combine, but teams will watch how much they support their teammates. The gym got rowdy as players began benching 230 pounds, a strategic five pounds heavier than what they would lift in Indianapolis.
While players pumped, an Exos photographer and videographer climbed as close as they could to shoot content. The videographer stepped between players’ legs, his camera hovering no more than a foot above the bar. Exos, like any entity with access to high-profile athletes, produces glossy videos for social media, and if anyone felt uncomfortable with the closeness or omnipresence of the cameras, no one said anything.
But as sports have grown into a bigger and bigger business and players have fought for more control over their place in it, some wonder how long this iteration of the business model will last. Stratton, the consultant, said the NCAA’s decision to allow players to profit from their names, images and likenesses may lead them to stop signing off on training facilities using photos of them on social media or in promotions.
“If that’s the case, are the top players going to be able to come in and train at a significant discount or free in exchange for [the facility] being able to say, ‘Hey, we trained this guy’? ” Stratton said.
On the bench, Wisconsin linebacker Leo Chenal had one of the most impressive performances of the morning. After 30 reps, the cheering stopped and wonder took over.
“That’s just a long time to be on the bench,” one player said. Chenal finished with 35.
Later, another prospect set a personal record and popped up, howling with excitement. A friend asked how he had done it. The first prospect pantomimed pushing a bar away from his chest until his arms looked “locked out,” as if they couldn’t extend further. Then he extended them further.
“You don’t got to lock out; you just got to make it look like it,” he said, outlining a strategy to save energy and produce more reps, highlighting what players will consider doing for good numbers.
Sometimes, when thinking of the combine as a game to exploit or as an archaic evaluation tool masquerading as a television event, it’s easy to forget how much impact it has. Players with higher draft positions or faster 40 times still get more chances to stick than those with worse numbers.
One afternoon at Exos, Dennis Jackson watched his son practice pass-rushing technique. Drake Jackson is an edge rusher from USC pegged by many analysts as a second-round prospect.
Both father and son understand the importance of this process. Dennis began putting Drake through combine drills when his son was 8 or 9, and a few years ago they started watching NFL Network’s “Path to the Draft” together. Agent Drew Rosenhaus told Drake that teams want him to bulk up from 260 to 275 pounds to improve at stopping the run, and Dennis was impressed by the weight Exos had helped his son add.
Dennis harbored hope that his son would improve his draft stock and maybe hear his name called in the first round. But he knew one event could greatly influence his position.
“He’s got to dominate the combine,” Dennis said.
ncG1vNJzZmivp6x7uK3SoaCnn6Sku7G70q1lnKedZMCxu9GtqmhqYGd%2FcHyRaGlxZ6OYvLbAyKeeZpufoq%2BqusRmq6uZmaO2r7OMnq%2Boq18%3D