NFL Pro day evaluators best avoid the Bridgewater trap

Written By David Steele
(Getty Images)

Jameis Winston is among a number of high-profile players who still have pro days scheduled. But just as with the NFL Scouting Combine results, there is no consensus on exactly how seriously evaluators should take the performances.

That counts double with elite quarterback prospects like Marcus Mariota, whose pro day was March 13 , and Winston, whose pro day at Florida State is March 31.

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For the two most recent examples, look back a year ago to Teddy Bridgewater and Johnny Manziel.

"Last year at this time, people were doubting him,'' Shawn Watson, Bridgewater's offensive coordinator at Louisville, told Sporting News. "This year, he proved he was the best of the lot.''

Manziel, meanwhile? "He set it up perfectly,'' renowned quarterback coach Steve Clarkson recalled about the former Heisman Trophy winner's pro day. "He worked out in pads. That made him stand out. The conditions were perfect.''

Manziel was picked 22nd overall in the first round by the Browns last year, 10 spots ahead of Bridgewater. While it may not have been so much about Manziel's attention-magnet of a pro day , Bridgewater's reportedly sub-par performance in his definitely contributed. Before their pro days, Bridgewater was almost universally acknowledged as more NFL-ready than Manziel, if not the most NFL-ready quarterback in the class.

Watson, now the offensive coordinator at Texas, sighs about that to this day, as he was the coach who prepared Bridgewater for the draft. Bridgewater's slide from likely top-five pick to almost out of the first round began in Louisville a year ago, when he was judged harshly for his accuracy and mechanics by onlookers.

"Everybody didn't know him like I did,'' countered Watson, ticking off a long list of tangible and intangible attributes that can't be measured in one workout. "And he had put everything on film.''

Still, no less a pair of onlookers than NFL Network analyst Mike Mayock and two-time MVP Kurt Warner were publicly unimpressed ("I expected a little bit more today,'' Mayock said). More important, actual team officials began souring on him, not just on his play but on his ability to lead a team.

"The talk about whether he could be the face of a franchise,'' Watson said, "that was hard to listen to.''

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Fast-forward to Mariota's pro day, where the reigning Heisman winner was widely panned . Yet the reaction to the lukewarm assessments were tempered - possibly because to how much weight was put on Bridgewater's last year.

Include Mayock - who surely gets more blame for the negative label put on Bridgewater than he deserves - in that group: he said of Mariota's pro day: "I would call his workout solid. But put it in perspective. We saw footwork, we saw arm strength, we saw an athlete. Does he need to polish (things up) for the NFL? Yes.''

For even more perspective, Mayock has said often during this pre-draft season that pro days and combines are too easy to blow out of proportion, using himself as an example. For one thing, he has said, the best pro day performance he has ever seen was by JaMarcus Russell in 2007. Russell is now considered one of the biggest draft busts of all time .

For another, Mayock said last month: "I'll be the first to put my hand up, and I hope I learn a lesson, in that I kind of bought into Johnny (Manziel) just being immature. Apparently, there's a lot more than that.''

He was far from the only observer fooled, and part of the misperception came from Manziel's pro day, some two weeks after Bridgewater's. Clarkson, who runs a camp that prepares quarterbacks form high school through the NFL, sees how it can happen.

At pro days, Clarkson said, "you want to give (scouts) what they want … There's a lot of showmanship, but it's often much ado about nothing.'' The workouts are tailored to produce attention-grabbing numbers, tons of completions at a high percentage, but they still take place in sterile, non-football conditions, he said.

The more critical parts of the process take place before pro day, and after. "The (teams) who really like you,'' Clarkson said, "will want to work you out on your own.''

That's when Bridgewater convinced the Vikings to trade back into the first round to take him with the last pick. His pro day turned into a cautionary tale … not for him, but for teams that put too much weight on them.