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.
One fascinating test case this week, then, is how early Miami edge Rueben Bain Jr. is drafted. Though fearsome in college, his arms measured at 30 ⅞ inches, which would make him the shortest of any edge rusher taken in the first round since 1999, according to Sporting News' tracking.
“[Bill] Parcells used to say, ‘If I’m going to take an outside linebacker and he’s less than 6-3, he better have at least 32-inch arms or he doesn’t have a chance of playing outside linebacker because he couldn’t get off blocks,” Fabianich said.
At safety, meanwhile, the archetype isn’t measured so much by height or length but the ability to sprint from the middle of the field to the “red line,” an imaginary marker about five yards inside the sideline to meet the routes of outside receivers. It translates to about 4.6-second 40-yard speed, Fabianich said.
Harrington never felt that scouts overvalued the things that were out of his control, like his size, versus those that were, such as his game tape. Then again, he understood he “fit the bill” of the tall, strong quarterback at 6-4 and 215 pounds.
Being shorter than 6 feet didn’t stop quarterbacks Kyler Murray and Bryce Young from being chosen No. 1 overall in 2019 and 2023, but they’re still the exception. Of the 96 quarterbacks on rosters before the 2025 draft, about 70% of them stood 6-foot-2 or taller.
“Some teams would never, ever draft a quarterback if his hands weren’t big,” Rivera said.
As a quarterback projected to be picked among the first five picks of the 2016 draft, Cal's Jared Goff was about to have the weight of a franchise placed upon his proverbial shoulders when he showed up for the scouting combine that year. But the scrutiny he received was all about his 9-inch hands.
“I’ve been told I have pretty big hands my whole life,” Goff said at the time. “I heard I have small hands yesterday, apparently. No, I’ve never had a problem with that or expect it to be a problem at all.”
Three years later, it was top prospect and quarterback Joe Burrow’s turn.
“Considering retirement after I was informed the football will be slipping out of my tiny hands,” he posted, sarcastically, on X, after his hands measured at 9 inches. “Please keep me in your thoughts.”
In their case, talent outweighed concern. Both were chosen No. 1 overall and have played for a Super Bowl.
“There’s certain guys that can play around a limited physical trait, but there’s also ones that can’t, and they get exposed, and once you get exposed in the league, everybody takes advantage of you. Everybody,” Fabianich said. “We used to always call it looking for ‘the fish.’ Who’s the one we want to pick on. Is it the mike linebacker who can’t cover on second down? Is it the safety that doesn’t have the range?”
When one team finds success using different methods, it can change draft preferences. The Seahawks of the early 2010s built a fearsome defense while targeting only tall cornerbacks such as Richard Sherman, who stands 6-foot-3. It was widely cited as helping accelerate a leaguewide trend toward taller defensive backs that could better combat taller receivers. Around the NFL, it became known that Seattle’s coach at the time, Pete Carroll, “wouldn’t touch a corner under 5-10 1/2 for a long time,” the scout said.
Other players are so ridiculously talented that they can shift preferences all by themselves. Fabianich counted cornerback Darrelle Revis, and safeties Ed Reed and Sean Taylor, as players who quickly became the model for their positions.
Fabianich was a scout with the Cowboys when Cole Beasley, a 5-foot-9 receiver, was a prospect whose height alone projected him as an inside receiver. Similarly, he said the team never viewed offensive lineman Zack Martin as a tackle because his arms, at 32 inches, were short of the ideal range of around 34 inches. Martin went on to an all-pro career at guard, on the line’s interior, where arm length isn’t as much of a concern as raw strength, the kind that made Jason Kelce, with 32 ½-inch arms, one of the best to ever play center, and Aaron Donald an all-time defensive lineman, despite being 6-foot-1 and around 290 pounds, smaller than the ideal for his position.
Every team creates an internal ranking of draft prospects, called a draft board, and players can move up and down as teams get hard data on their measurements. When Polian was running the Colts from 1998 to 2011, a defensive end was initially reported to have 33-inch arms. In fact, they measured 32 ¼.
“Well, that’s an issue,” Polian said. “So you’ve got to discuss that.”
When Rivera broke into life as an NFL assistant in the 1990s, he learned quickly that in the draft process, “we broke guys up based on speed, right off the bat, and if they didn’t hit this number, [teams] moved him to the back.” That didn’t sit quite right with Rivera, partly because he remembered scouts thinking he wasn’t fast enough at linebacker when he entered the 1984 NFL draft.
He went on to play for nine years, believing that his raw foot speed didn’t capture his ability to recognize plays and react quickly. He’s spent his career trying to find value by understanding the context around a prospect’s statistics and measurements. Two-time Super Bowl-winning coach Tom Coughlin instilled in Rivera that an average 40-time can disguise an explosive first step. A player’s struggle to remember plays might stem from an undiagnosed learning disability. It led Rivera to push prospects to be honest during pre-draft interviews.
“You’re about to make a multimillion-dollar decision, and I gotta be right, so you got to be up-front,” he said. “There’s ideal numbers that everybody thinks about, but there are some things that are immeasurable. I’m saying heart, desire, intelligence, you know, stuff like that. There’s no real way to measure those things.”
Teams have understood this since football began. In their 1997 book, “Finding The Winning Edge,” coaches Brian Billick and Bill Walsh, who began the 49ers’ dynastic run through the 1980s, identified ideal sizes for certain positions. Receivers, they argued, were ideally 6-foot-3 and 210 pounds.
But against this standardized ideal, he also argued for nuance. Walsh called “astute teams” those that would “keep the results of these evaluative measures in perspective.” He noted that after leaving college, Jerry Rice, the NFL’s all-time leader in receiving yards and touchdowns, ran only a 4.59 40-second dash, which might otherwise get a receiver demoted to second-tier.
“No matter how fast an athlete runs, how high he jumps or how well he scores on a written test, his value can only be related to how functional he is on the field,” Walsh added. “In reality, functionality is usually something that cannot be precisely measured any place except on the practice field or in a game situation.”
In that way, his evaluation of future Hall of Fame quarterback Joe Montana wasn’t driven by a black-and-white size-and-strength rubric. Walsh didn’t scout Montana in person until only a few days before the 1979 draft, but “when I saw Joe, I knew immediately that he was our man,” Walsh wrote. “He was quick, agile and fluid in his movements, almost like a ballet dancer, and reminded me of Joe Namath.”
Two decades after Detroit drafted Harrington No. 3 overall in 2002, he was invited back to the combine to act as a sounding board for the newest generation of quarterbacks. He found a league he felt had become “more adaptable” in its scouting, partly because spread offenses in high school and college had allowed smaller, more nimble players to thrive at quarterback. Harrington said he wanted to share with younger players his experience that success in the NFL isn’t entirely dependent on the eye test.
By only his third NFL season, Harrington said he’d lost the self-confidence that made him such a college star.
“My measurables hadn’t changed,” he said. “I was still 6-foot, I was still 215 pounds. My hand size was still the same, but I was a completely different player when I left Detroit than when I entered.”
About that hand size, though. What was his? Harrington laughed.
“Hell if I know,” he said.
