Conventional wisdom holds that a team can find a very good running back just about anywhere in the draft. But is that really a realistic assessment?
In two previous posts (on Defensive Ends and Defensive Tackles) we re-introduced you to a metric called SPARQ, which is a single number designed to summarize a player's athleticism. The number is calculated with a proprietary formula that incorporates player weight, bench press, broad jump, vertical jump, forty-yard dash, ten-yard split, short shuttle and 3-cone drill (details here).
In those two posts, we combined the SPARQ metric with a metric for the college production of defensive linemen called the 'Production Ratio' to see which draft prospects would emerge as the most productive AND most athletic.