Preparing Players for the NFL Draft Is Now a Data-Driven Mad Science Experiment

Blood scans, performance quotients, and personalized training programs aimed to help a college football stage walk across that stage just a little sooner.


Every 15 minutes or so a new name is called. Every time a shiny new NFL draft pick walks across the stage to meet the commissioner, it marks the culmination of that player's lifelong dream. But before that grip-and-grin moment for the cameras, in the months of torturous waiting leading up to the draft, these athletes have undertaken high-tech training, testing, and body perfecting of a kind that wasn't even possible a few years ago, and all to earn a moment on the stage just a bit sooner than the next guy.

NFL teams don't just watch film of old games to decide which college players to draft. They poke. They prod. They subject the potential draftees to pre-draft workouts and psychological examinations; 40-yard dashes and tests of mental prowess. Because all these metrics have monetary ramifications, sending players rising or falling in the annual seven-round extravaganza, maximizing every ounce of muscle, every pound of power, and every split second of speed matters. That's why, long before the April NFL Draft and the February meat market of the NFL Combine, agents pay the up-front thousands of dollars to send prospective NFL players to a data-driven biometrics-tracking quasi-boot camp. They send them to a place like EXOS.

"I thought I would just come in and get faster and stronger"

With its headquarters in Phoenix and major training centers in Florida, California, and Texas, EXOS hosts about 140 would-be NFL athletes every year. From the moment an athlete walks on campus—a 30,000-square-foot indoor center that includes ice baths, a recovery pool, physical therapy rooms, a nutrition center, in-house chef for all meals, film rooms, study rooms, artificial turf field, track and more—their typical six-week stay is totally scripted. It starts with "performance quotient reports" on each player. The report includes questions around training and nutrition and includes measurements with respect to specific movements—often using force plates and motion-capture systems to get pinpoint speed and power data and video to dissect form—valuable in combine-measured drills, such as vertical jumps measured in multiple ways, 40-yard dash times and weightlifting measurements. Craig Friedman, vice president of the EXOS performance innovation team, says the company then uses a proprietary algorithm to make a unique performance signature for every player.


Questions about what motivates a player to workout and perform, how they feel during workouts and their history with nutrition and training help give a subjective view of a players' ability to handle intense training. Add in objective movement measurements, heart rate variability, field tests, and nutrition and recovery habits, and Friedman says he can map out a figure that gives EXOS coaches targets for specific improvements—key areas where a player can improve. "We can paint a reasonable picture for the athlete and the agent," he says, "and give them a target of expectations."

In a new twist this year, EXOS has taken the nutrition component to a tech-focused realm, offering athletes the opportunity for a blood draw at the start of the program so that nutritionists and dietitians personalize and customize plans. Laura Kunces, EXOS' director of research, tells Popular Mechanics the blood markers track vitamin and mineral deficiencies and inflammation and hormonal markers. "What small dietary things can we do to make a large impact on a performance outcome?" Kunces asks. "What health markers improve bone density and make them a stronger, better?"

EXOS, in tandem with Thorne Research and WellnessFX plan to review data from this year to check on correlations between performance and diet. "For a lot of athletes, this might be the first time they have ever gotten their blood drawn," she says. "Most have no clue what any of this stuff is."

The real-time data can then define which foods athletes should eat based on ingredients, and help the recovery experts decide what nutrients are needed in post-workout shakes, for example. EXOS also maps athletes' body cell composition to understand deficiencies, such as if a player needs more fatty acids, Omega 3s, or other supplements.


"The diagnostics have caught up to a point where you can start to be empowered with your own data versus having to wait for it to be translated by a medical provider," Amanda Carlson-Phillips, EXOS vice president of nutrition and research, tells Popular Mechanics. "As we start to understand nutrients, let's look at markers as things that might translate to better performance later."

Each athlete's personalized nutrition needs then inform the creation of a dynamic meal plan, often one much healthier than they experienced in college. Carlson-Phillips says an athlete might need a carbohydrate in a certain phase, an anti-inflammatory food in a stressful time or adaptions to proteins, amino acids and more during recoveries. "It all melds into individual recommendations they see in the training floor, fueling station, in the food they are eating and in the way we are concocting hydration beverages," she says. "It is feeding into a unique athlete experience." And it changes with them, based on training and performance data.


Darian Thompson, a Boise State University safety projected as a possible late first-round pick, says this crazy data-driven process has been far different than what he experienced while at school, and much more interesting than he imagined. "I thought I would just come in and get faster and stronger," he tells Popular Mechanics. "I didn't really realize how many steps there are and how important each and every aspect of the training is."

With that final handshake the goal, high-tech training helps get every possible ounce of performance from these athletes. Those ounces add up when it comes to draft day.

Follow Tim Newcomb on Twitter at @tdnewcomb.

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