Mile High Report
For a position with little production data, can AI be predictive for NFL success?
I recently used the NFL’s partnership with Amazon Web Services to look at their ability to project NFL success for college tight ends and running backs, but what about offensive lineman, for which there exists almost no production data. Can the same methodology be applied? Let’s dig in and find out.
From 2003-2025 there have been 706 OTs who participated in the NFL combine. Of those 101 have earned a draft score of 79 or better (50-100 scale). The draft score looks at athleticism and productivity and NFL performance of those that came before and assigns a draft grade similar to NFL.com’s 0-10 scale for draft score. Draft scores can be highly inaccurate though.
There is also Kent Lee Platte’s Mathbomb, which has a metric called RAS (relative athletic score). I want to know how that correlates to AWS’ athleticism score for OTs. 636 OTs did all of the drills to get a RAS score. AWS’ will predict an athleticism score if a player only does some or none of the drills.
In terms of All-Time RAS (relative to all other guys at your position) only one OT has gotten a 10.00 - Spencer Brown in 2021. AWS give him an the highest possible athleticism score of 99. He was taken in the 3rd round by the Bills. The correlation for offensive tackles between ATH score and All-Time RAS is 0.76. That is a really strong correlation in the world of sports data. Later we will look at some of the outliers.
(NOTE this is only a portion of the offensive tackles from 2003-2025)
The trend line is much closer to the data as you get above 80, but part of that is that there are more data points in that region. Because I was having to scrub the data from the AWS/NFL site I didn’t go below 79 for all tackles in terms of athleticism. The only ones that I pulled who were below 79 at those who were really “productive” in college.
There are 34 OTs who got a productivity score of 90 or better 2003-2025 (see below) and some of them were deemed to be “not very athletic” by AWS.
OT - ATH Score - ALL-Time RAS (if they got one)
Tunsil was the 13th pick. Stanley was the 6th. Long was the 1st. Gross was the 8th. Monroe was the 8th. Brown was the 5th. Jones was the 111th. Wynn was the 23rd. Smith was the 6th. So with the exception of Jones, all of these OTs went really high in the draft despite there...
