Coronavirus, social distancing doesn't stop NFL Draft prospects from having their Pro Day
MARTINSVILLE, N.J. – At least initially, there was no plan, at least not for Isaiah Davis. The former Maryland linebacker is among the hundreds of hopefuls caught between being within an arm’s reach of the NFL Draft and two arm lengths from everyone else due to social distancing.
In a world that seems upside down in recent days, COVID-19 is having an impact on the NFL Draft, including the cancellation of the event in Las Vegas. In recent days, NFL teams pulled their scouts from the road where they were evaluating college players. In light of the coronavirus, NFL teams are now unable to host college prospects at their facilities.
In particular, while it might make things more difficult for teams the fallout of the pandemic hits draft prospects in both the obvious and the obscure, throwing a cloud over the next month of preparation for the draft.
And while the NFL Combine was conducted without a hitch in Indianapolis last month, for hundreds of other players the platform they were relying on to help spur them before NFL teams was ripped away last week. Nearly every major college cancelled their Pro Day due to the coronavirus. Teams have shuttered their scouts. Now, players who didn’t have their big moment at the combine but still have legitimate NFL ambitions are caught in limbo.
They are five weeks from the NFL Draft. But how can they showcase when they are to be six feet away due to social distancing?
On Monday morning, in what at times seemed surreal, an athletic training facility in central New Jersey hosted their own Pro Day. TEST Football Academy has trained dozens of draft prospects over the years including Patrick Peterson, Joe Flacco, Duron Harmon, Logan Ryan, Darnell Savage, Vlad Ducasse, Jamal Westerman and others. With no scouts in attendance and only players as well as TEST staff in the facility, a Pro Day was run to showcase players who had their college day ripped away from them.
On the artificial turf inside the TEST field house, a total of 28 players participated in everything from the 225-pound bench press to the timed 40 and the 3-cone drill. TEST put together a livestream of the event on their Facebook page. Five teams told TEST’s CEO Kevin Dunn that they would be checking in to watch the event. Dunn thinks that more than that tuned in to the stream.
For the players involved - who ranged from programs such as Rutgers, Maryland and Ole Miss to Ferris State and Division III Kean - it was a lifeline in a very uncertain time. What was supposed to be the culmination of weeks of hard work and effort was thrown into a blender last week as one Pro Day after another fell victim to the pandemic.
Two months of preparation, and now no Pro Day to show up for.
“I don’t know what I would have done, it would have been a huge waste of time and effort,” Davis told SportsIllustrated.com. The Maryland linebacker had 59 tackles as a senior.
“All this work and…it is kind of like a hit on the face, all this work you put in and then you don’t have it. My Pro Day was Plan A, B, C. When we found out last week that it wasn’t going to happen, my world shattered for a second.”
This year, TEST had two players among the roughly three dozen they are training who were invited to the NFL Combine.
Nearly everyone else, as is the case for many of the prospects who will be drafted next month, were relying on their Pro Day to be their showcase before NFL teams. When those got cancelled, everything was seemingly thrown into uncertainty and a measure of chaos.
For weeks the players at TEST, have trained for this moment. It is a scene repeated at dozens of other facilities across the country. NFL hopefuls study the nuance of running the 40 and train in specific ways to up their bench press. It is the Princeton Review of the NFL Draft, a two-month crash course on how to shave hundredths of a second off the 3-cone shuttle drill or eek out two more reps on the bench press.
Those slight differences , one way or another, can land a player in an NFL camp come summer or have them eyeing graduate schools for the fall.
The importance of the Pro Day is not lost on TEST's CEO Dunn or Geir Gudmundsen, the barrel-chested and thickly bearded director of TEST Football Academy. When colleges began to cancel their events last week, they realized that many of their players were losing out on the chance to display their hard work before NFL teams.
“We had a circle of trust meeting on Friday and decided we needed to do this for our players regardless of having the presence of NFL Scouts. We felt under the gun to make this happen due to the ongoing updates we were getting regarding COVID-19,” Dunn said.
“As it turns out, the governor of New Jersey just mandated that all gyms close in the state beginning at 8 p.m. this evening. If the NFL wasn’t coming to their schools for their Pro Days, we wanted to create an opportunity that could bring our guys to them. Being in the business for 21 years, many of the scouts recognize the quality of our work and consistency of our watches. We wanted it to be a live event and use laser times for the 40s to make everything as authentic and transparent as possible.”
Gudmundsen has walked this path before. He first went to TEST in 2005 as an NFL Draft prospect out of Albany. He signed with the Buffalo Bills after the draft and then went on to a career in the Arena Football League. Since 2008, he’s been a part of the TEST family as a trainer and now meticulously oversees the entire combine training program.
As someone whose training before his Pro Day paid dividends in helping him land an NFL contract, Gudmundsen felt for those whose own big stage was ripped away from them due to the coronavirus.
“As a player who has gone through this process not having the opportunity to participate in a Pro Day would have been devastating. The fact of the matter is Pro Days are important because other than their game film it is an opportunity to standout and showcase their measurables. To an area scout and positional coach a Pro Day is valuable because it gives teams an opportunity to dig deeper into the evaluation process for an athlete that they have interest in,” Gudmundsen said.
“We wanted to put this Pro Day together to make sure we gave all of our athletes a platform to showcase their athleticism, speed and power. This situation is small in comparison to recent world events but we wanted give these guys every opportunity to be evaluated for what they have been training for these past couple of months. If it leads to a tryout, a second look, an opportunity - it was all worth it.”
In some ways, it all felt like a bit of a dream. In a world dominated by virus talk, here was 50 yards of turf where everything seem normal. Players stretched and warmed up. Some sprinted to ready for the 40. Others finished their bench press. A couple tossed a football in the corner, staying loose. Interns ran around getting things ready for the next event.
All seemed normal, all was about football.
A few feet away, however, there was a reminder that these aren't normal times.
On the televisions outside of the fieldhouse where the cardio equipment resides, the flat screens showed the national news. On the broadcast flashed details about the pandemic, updating in minutiae the growing number of Americans affected. The number, the broadcasters said, was climbing.
Feet away, players were setting up the cones for a drill, focusing on their NFL dreams. They were oblivious and in the moment. The only inkling of a very different world was the constant wiping down of equipment with disinfectant by the TEST staff.
When Bill Murray, a defensive lineman from William & Mary, put up 30 reps on the bench press, his fellow participants in the Pro Day erupted with howls and full-throated cheers. One lineman rushed at him with exuberance, wanting to give him a bear hug.
It was natural to want to celebrate. After months of training together these prospects saw each other not as competitors but fellow dreamers, hopeful of landing in the NFL.
A chorus of players yelled and extended their arms. The player who was ready to embrace Murray stopped on a dime and smiled, then extended his elbow in the direction of Murray, who bumped him back with his own elbow to prevent touching hands and spreading germs. Social distancing has come to even Pro Days.
In the past, TEST has had a Pro Day for their own athletes, including three years ago when Terron Beckham, the cousin of All-Pro wide receiver Odell Beckham Jr., attempted to make the jump from professional body building to the NFL. On that day, the NFL hopeful put up an impressive 40 repetitions on the 225-pound bench press and earned an invite to rookie minicamp with the New York Jets.
But while TEST has run a Pro Day before, they always did so with weeks of careful planning and usually on a much smaller scale. Also, they never live streamed it before, another logistical hassle. In the past, it was mainly local players, perhaps a dozen at most. A handful of scouts would regularly attend.
Yet by Saturday morning, just a day or two after most of the Pro Days began to be cancelled, Dunn and Gudmundsen had planned the details for the event. Before the group of prospects worked out on Saturday, they were told about the Pro Day.
Most planned to participate in their college days in a week or two. No one expected to have a Pro Day in just two short days.
“It came quick, I was expecting Pro Day to happen on the 25th. It came quicker than I expected but this was good,” Mississippi cornerback Myles Hartsfield told SportsIllustrated.com. It was a big day for Hartsfield a he ran a 4.39 laser time with a 38.5-inch vertical.
“You have to leave it in God’s hands, He never puts anything in front of you that you can’t handle. I just left it up to Him. I knew He would lead me through eventually.”
For Greg Liggs, simply having a Pro Day to attend amidst the uncertainty created by the coronavirus is a big help. A defensive back from Elon, Liggs has something to prove to scouts because he played for an FCS program. NFL teams will have a bias against programs like Elon because they don’t play big competition on a weekly basis.
A player like Liggs can benefit from a Pro Day because the measurables back up the tape. Elon was supposed to hold their Pro Day on March 26 in conjunction with Wake Forest. Ironically, Liggs had his best performance of his senior season at Wake Forest, registering five tackles and two passes defended in a loss at the ACC program.
The joint Pro Day with Wake Forest hasn’t been cancelled yet but in reading the tea leaves about what is happening around the country with other cancellations, the FCS First Team All-American said “this was an opportunity I couldn’t pass up.”
If there is no Pro Day at Wake Forest, Liggs said he would have been left to pray and hope that his senior film would be enough to attract the attention of NFL teams. Then Monday’s event, much sooner than he anticipated, appeared. He ran a 4.47 laser time, a 4.43 hand-led in the 40 with a 10-yard split of 1.47.
Liggs also had a 40.5-inch vertical. He helped his NFL case tremendously.
“At this point, we were all kind of on edge. This was the best opportunity at the moment for us,” Liggs said.
“I’m still looking forward to seeing what happens – if anything – the next few weeks.”
Shane Leatherbury is another player who, as of last week, uncertain if he’d have any type of an event to showcase himself to scouts before the draft. A wide receiver out of Towson, he is not unlike Liggs in needing a Pro Day to help solidify himself as a late round pick or as an undrafted rookie free agent.
Towson’s Pro Day was scheduled for March 26th. He admits that participating in Monday’s event, 10 days earlier than scheduled, threw him for a bit of a loop.
Yet Leatherbury was one of the outstanding players at the event, running 4.42 laser time in the 40 as well as a 40.5-inch vertical.
“I thought once they started cancelling, it’d be based off film then. Maybe they’d invite more guys to [rookie] minicamp, I don’t know how it’d even work out,” Leahterbury said.
“Today was good. It was sooner than I expected but this was good. This gives teams a chance to look at my film and how I did today. It was a success, for sure.”
