For NFL prospects, hand size and wingspan matter as much as on-field performance

In the months before the 2002 NFL draft, all kinds of metrics suggested Joey Harrington was bound to be a top-5 pick. As Oregon’s quarterback, he’d led his team near the top of the polls and become a finalist of college football’s biggest awards.

It was an impressive body of work.

But as he and fellow prospects waited inside an Indianapolis hotel that winter during the league’s annual scouting combine, no evaluation of Harrington was complete until NFL evaluators had also judged his actual body.

“You literally have to stand in your underwear on a stage in front of a room full of executives that have their notepad out,” Harrington told NBC News.

When evaluators from 32 teams gather in a room, not everyone sees the same thing. The players they’re scouting are already outliers: of the more than 1 million high schoolers who play football annually in the United States, fewer than 78,000 go on to play in college, with only 1,696 active roster spots in the NFL. Only 257 players are drafted annually.

But that doesn’t mean all 300-plus players invited to the combine are sure things. A great draft pick can ensure years of success. An underperforming one can get an executive or coach fired.

To be right more often than they’re wrong, teams have tried for decades to establish preferences of traits and measurables — beyond just height and weight — they believe will translate to the best odds of a player’s future success. Those preferences can vary from team to team, influenced by differing philosophies. Some characteristics, however, are almost universally considered the ideal, the kind that everybody at the combine with a notepad jots down as quickly as they spot it.

“There are ideal measurables at every position, but [arm] length in the trenches is definitely the biggest one you talk about,” said one team scout, who requested anonymity to discuss the scouting process.

The 40-yard dash is a benchmark test.

“You better be a 4.4 [second] corner, and if you’re not a 4.4 corner, you better be able to press,” said Drew Fabianich, a longtime Dallas Cowboys scout who is now the executive director of the Senior Bowl, a predraft exhibition game for draft hopefuls. “Safeties, you better be 4.6 or better.”

The baseline height for a can’t-miss receiver “right now, it’s somewhere around 6-3,” said Ron Rivera, the general manager of Cal football who spent four decades in the NFL as a linebacker and head coach in both Carolina and Washington. And for the players asked to guard them?

“If you can draft a 6-3 corner instead of a 5-9 corner, you’re gonna do it,” he said.

“Not every metric was important to us,” former Colts general manager Bill Polian said.

But some were.

“For instance, with us, receivers had to be 4.51 or faster,” Polian said.

As the NFL draft returns Thursday in Pittsburgh, this is the only time of year that football fans are likely to hear about an offensive tackle’s 31-inch arms (too short to hold off a long-armed defensive end?) or a quarterback’s nine-inch hands (too small to grip a football in bad weather?). Measurements such as those have drawn pushback as too subjective.

But Fabianich, whose job at the Senior Bowl requires scouting hundreds of college players and talking with dozens of teams about their impressions of them, said such universally desired measurements aren’t chosen arbitrarily, but the result of years of tracking which players tend to succeed, and which don’t.

Bigger hands allow quarterbacks more grip; bigger receivers present bigger targets; longer arms allow for more control.

“I coached the game, and I played it. I was 5-9, so I understand: It’s a big man’s game,” Fabianich said. “Small guys wear down, big guys don’t get any smaller, right? And that’s just the lay of the land now. So there are really good players that are small. But as a lot of people say, ‘Name me another one.’”

Whether a player can measure up often means doing so literally by fitting into one of the league’s established archetypes. The team scout likened the process to evaluators comparing prospects against their “mental library.” And watching, say, Cleveland edge rusher Myles Garrett use his 35-inch arms to bulldoze his way to the single-season sack record tends to leave an impression.

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