Breaking down Steelers NFL Combine numbers over the past decade

What is a three-cone drill or short shuttle?

As an average NFL fan for much of my life, I thought the 20-yard shuttle or the 3 cone drill were neat exercises that showed men in underwear tip-toeing around cones or bouncing back and forth between lines as fast as possible. It reminded me of those golden years in grade school when physical education teachers would put kids through a handful of different exercises like running back and forth from one line in the gym to another, usually until we dropped from exhaustion. I’m old. We weren’t as worried about what could go wrong back then.

But I’m getting off-topic. Where was I? Oh yeah, combine drills not named the 40-yard dash. I didn’t pay much attention to these drills until the 2010 NFL combine when numerous outlets went at least slightly berserker about a 3 cone time established by a highly regarded prospect named Von Miller.

Sure, Miller had already run a wide receiver-like 4.53 in the 40-yard dash, and given my condition at the time, it was enough for me to believe he’d be a successful linebacker at the next level. That said, members of the sporting press were also tweeting about the 6.7 seconds he’d required to run back and forth and around 4 cones.

It wasn’t until 2013 when the Steelers seemed driven to draft a guy named Jarvis Jones that I began paying attention to what these drills meant. Jones was slow, by NFL standards. At the combine, he ran a pedestrian 4.74 in the 40-yard dash and then backed it up at his pro day with a 4.88. Yikes! Having still been plagued with 40yarddasheritus, I was horrified, but at some level, I believed my beloved Steelers must have found something else to explain his status as a first-round pick.

I dug in. As it turns out, Jarvis Jones did not participate in the 3 cone drill at the combine or on his pro day, and when he ran the 20-yard short shuttle, he turned in a time of 4.71 seconds. I had no idea what that meant so I began to look at other players. The more I learned, the more I realized that Jarvis Jones was simply a bad athlete (again, by NFL standards), and for some reason, the Steeler had talked themselves into picking him.

But I was turning the corner with my own affliction. I began to learn more and more about successful players at different positions as it related to these drills. I also watched on the field as players who “underperformed” in the 40-yard dash, like Le’Veon Bell and Antonio Brown, became elite superstars who were mentioned as generational players.

And so, as my own understanding of the combine results improved, I took it upon myself to understand the traits that great Steelers players possessed rather than simply relying on the 40 time.