Former Clemson DE Da'Quan Bowers wakes up at 6:30 every morning, grabs some fruit and heads out the door to Athletes' Performance Institute, an award-winning facility in Los Angeles. He is in physical therapy by 8 a.m., and begins his workout at 9. After the main part of the workout, Bowers moves into positional work with former NFL great Willie McGinest. This is followed by a meal prepared by a nutrition staff, as well as supplementary diet pills and booster drinks.
All in a day's work.
Former Northwestern DT Corbin Bryant wakes up at 8 a.m. and heads to TCBoost, located in a small industrial park, down a dirt road in Northbrook, Ill. After a brief warm-up, Bryant goes through a running workout led by Tom and Bob Christian, two former Northwestern football players, the latter of whom played for 11 years in the NFL. After the running workout, Bryant studies film of his running form, before a lifting workout later in the day.
Both players are putting themselves through grueling training schedules in order to prepare for the NFL draft. The difference? Bowers is a surefire top-five pick in this year's draft, whereas Bryant is hoping to be picked up in the seventh round. But in today's NFL, both players must have the facilities and resources to prepare for the draft, a fact that has created a boom in the market for sports performance companies that specialize in training NFL draft prospects.
"It's blown up, it's out of control," said Joe Flanagan, Bowers' agent at BTI Sports. "It's taken on a life of its own. What used to be considered a real luxury for the top picks is now a virtual mandate for anyone who thinks they're a draft pick or even a guy who projects as a priority free agent."
Facilities now feature full-time culinary staffs, massage therapists and nutritionists to make sure every detail of a player's preparation is accounted for.
It's a stark change from when Warren Anderson, the owner of Rehab Plus, a facility that has trained such players as Donovan McNabb, Tiki Barber and Zach Miller over the years, entered the industry.
"At the time the kids weren't all versed in the 40 (yard dash), short shuttle and all those things, so it probably had some value," Anderson said. "Over the next 26 years or whatever it's been, it has sort of morphed into a monster of its own."
Back in the day
Back in 1990 when Bob Christian was concluding his career at Northwestern, there were no shiny, state-of-the-art facilities with brand-new weight equipment and in-house culinary staffs. Instead, Christian improvised.
"I had to work (draft training) in between electromechanics and other classes I was taking," Christian said. "I usually worked out in the middle of the day, because that's when the facility was the most free. They didn't have the other sports teams using it. I just found time between classes and went over to Northwestern's athletic facilities and got after it."
Fortunately, Christian had a few teammates who were also looking to train for the draft, so he didn't have to train alone. But facilities weren't Christian's only concern.
"My regimen was all messed up because we didn't have a pro day back then, and scouts would just call, and most of the time they would say, 'I'm going to be in town tomorrow. Can you run for me?' " Christian said.
This could often lead to poor times if, for instance, Christian had just done a heavy squat workout the prior day. Other times, he would have to run multiple days in a row, due to the schedule of scouts.
"There were times when I ran multiple days in a row, and my hamstrings were stretched to the max," Christian said. "In fact, I pulled my hamstring in the last sprint for the last scout. I don't think he knew, though; I kind of hid that. Luckily it didn't matter."
In today's era of pro days and the entertainment circus that has become the NFL Scouting Combine, those days of guesswork and pulled hamstrings are all gone. They have given way to a culture of precisely measured workout plans and regimens, with every set and repetition planned out months in advance.
The system approach
Talk to Mark Verstegen, and he sounds like he belongs in an Ivy League lecture hall, not in a weight room training football players. "Systems," "analytics," "strategies" are just some of the words that find their way into his comments as he talks through his approach to training. Verstegen is the founder and president of Athletes' Performance, based in Phoenix, but he also has authored books on his training philosophy and recently presented at an MIT analytics conference.
"(Our facility) is a complete integration of all physical therapy services, athletic training services and massage therapy services," Verstegen said. "We have a full-time culinary staff at our facilities, and that's seamlessly integrated with our nutrition supplementation with Gatorade and EAS where our systems and innovations help power their products."
While all of the focus at the Combine might be on the fastest 40-time, and the highest vertical jump, Verstegen sees his industry in a different light.
"We try to take a proactive look at manageable variables within someone's lifestyle and performance plan to make sure that they are fulfilling their full potential," Verstegen said. "We try to get each athlete to understand that each day is game day, that they have to prepare for it, they have to fuel for it, they have to train for it, and ultimately they have to recover for it."
The Combine factor
Thanks in great part to NFL Network's wall-to-wall coverage of the Combine, more and more people are obsessed with the numbers that prospects are putting up.
"I think the NFL is always going to be able to use that Combine as an entertainment and marketing vehicle," Anderson said. "That's the only venue where people can see these kids in their underwear, without their helmets and pads on."
And of all the tests at the Combine, none draws more attention than the 40-yard dash.
"I had a scout tell me that 90 percent of where they get drafted is what they did in college, on the field, that's on film," Tom Christian said. "Ten percent is the Combine and pro timing day. And of that 10 percent, 90-95 percent of that is their 40-time."
But at the same time, if every player is training for the Combine, is all this training making everyone relatively the same?
"Some teams feel, all of these facilities are almost ruining the Combine, because everybody is preparing for the test," Verstegen said. "And it's a fair statement."
Anderson elaborated on the point further.
"To be candid, as things have changed with the (Nike) SPARQ clinics and the Under Armour clinics, these kids have been running short shuttles now for 10 years," he said. "The value of it has become less and less and less."
Six weeks?
From the end of the college football bowl season in late December to the Combine in late February, it leaves little more than six weeks for these draft hopefuls to fine-tune their measurables. While that might seem like a small amount of time, some directors have seen tremendous results.
"We had a guy from Nebraska, Patrick Kabongo, a defensive tackle, 6-7, 340. His initial 40-time was a 6-flat, which isn't very good," Tom Christian said. "Eight weeks later at Nebraska's pro day (in 2004), he ran a 5.3, so seven-tenths of a second is a huge change."
While it might be only six weeks, when you consider that training is almost nonstop during this period of time, Verstegen believes that positive results are inevitable.
"They start to go through getting breakfast, lunch, dinner plus snacks and their bedtime food delivered by a culinary staff to the gram and then specific training multiple times a day," Verstegen said. "The right amount of sleep, all the regeneration they do between workouts, the therapy, the massage therapy — you can literally watch people transform in the course of six weeks."
During this six-week period, the focus isn't on physical training alone. Facilities must prepare their players for the rigorous interview process that accompanies the NFL draft.
Just a few years ago, the physical training might have been the sole focus of their preparation.
"Now I've got to do Combine prep, prepare them for job interviews, the Wonderlic test," said Chip Smith, the founder of Competitive Edge Sports in Atlanta, who has trained such athletes as Brian Urlacher, James Harrison and Champ Bailey.
Christian also recognizes the wide-ranging preparation that now takes place during Combine training time.
"Guys are going to be taking a Wonderlic test that they can take practice tests on," Tom Christian said. "It's not something that we offer, but it's something that we considered, buying them study materials, saying, 'Hey, you have nothing else to do, why don't you take this test?' "
Agent or the facility?
With so many facilities now looking to train the top prospects, the competition to sign players to train at a facility has become increasingly heated. Similarly, agents continue to attempt to find ways to sign players to be represented by them. These factors have led to a symbiotic relationship of sorts between draft training facilities and agents.
"In the last five, 10 years, the agents have to find some kind of selling point to get the kid," Anderson said. "A lot of them lock up their slots with (Athletes' Performance Institute), for example, and that's their selling point. These guys say, 'Hey, we can send you to API, and the next guy can't.' "
These deals are lined up even before a player begins fall camp.
"Long before we get into that season, we already have those spots filled with those particular agents," Verstegen said. "They know that we are working hard on making sure that when that time comes, that we will deliver for those athletes."
A facility like Athletes' Performance can be the puppeteer directing the agents, but for other facilities it can be the other way around.
"We have a good relationship with a core group of agents," Tom Christian said. "As agents do well, they send us guys and we do well."
For an agent, however, the decision to support a player at a certain facility is an expensive, and potentially risky, move.
"Agents are making an investment on a player that they want to see a return on," Tom Christian said. "To pay for the training facility, lodging, food, supplements and transportation, it really adds up, and if it's not likely that they're ever going to sign an NFL contract, that's a bad decision by that agent."
The National Football Post recently estimated that, after taking into account all of these costs for all of the players attempting to make it in the NFL, the total industry cost spent on training the rookie class by agents is somewhere in the neighborhood of $7.7 million.
However, agents aren't the only people out recruiting these players. Facilities themselves have begun recruiting players in an environment Flanagan compared to the financial market.
"You see Combine prep guys actually out recruiting players in advance of any association with an agent," Flanagan said. "That's how competitive the environment has become. When the agent finally gets to him, a player might say, 'Hey, I want to train with this guy.' "
Coming at it from the other side, Anderson agrees with Flanagan's assessment.
"A lot of these places recruit kids," Anderson said. "The training places recruit kids. They want to offer more and more amenities — daily massage and cooking for them and all that — it's just grown and grown and grown."
The NFL
As these facilities continue to grow and spend more and more time with elite prospects, it's only natural that a relationship develops between facility directors and NFL personnel folks looking to get an inside scoop on a certain player.
"I've had a GM call me for the past 11 years and ask me to give him a sleeper pick," Smith said.
Verstegen acknowledges that he will have conversations with NFL people, but only if the player or agent signs off on it. Verstegen believes that, in these conversations, a facility can be a real selling point to raise a player's stock.
"They know that if they have had an athlete that enters their system from a place like ours, and they know what type of miles are put on that car, the value of that athlete in their mind, and their projections based on analytics, is a much more sure bet than if they're just trying to go buy used cars all the time and not know what they're getting," Verstegen said.
Where do we go from here?
With this industry taking off exponentially, is there still more room for growth? If preparing for Wonderlic tests was the new advance five years ago, what will be the new advance five years from now?
For one, it seems bringing in former NFL players (a la McGinest) and coaches has become more in vogue.
"The real value is going to be more and more into the football stuff," Anderson said. "It's going to be more and more people working with NFL coaches and NFL players."
Some directors are already frustrated with the 40-centric focus that the Combine creates.
"My theory is this: Your muscle fibers, when they're recruited, don't know whether they are being recruited to run a 40 or do a three-step or five-step drop if I'm a quarterback," Smith said. "So why train for 10 seconds of Combine training? Why train 95 percent for the Combine?"
Bob Christian tries to teach his athletes about more than just how to run a 40-yard dash.
"I try to teach them a little bit about what they're going to face," Bob Christian said. "I try to teach them about life, because no one teaches a college student how to handle a million dollars if it suddenly falls into their lap."
At the core of it, more and more facilities view themselves not as keepers of knowledge on how to run a fast 40-time, but rather guardians and stewards for athletes as they make the transition from the college ranks to being professionals. This is more likely to be the trend that drives the next phase of draft training facilities, rather than any new way to run a three-cone drill.
"I really classify what we are doing as more of us taking an intermediary step for these teams to get these guys in the right mindset, have the right capacities to enter their organization, and truly deliver from Day One and be able to do that for their entire career," Verstegen said.
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