The Philadelphia Eagles' picks are among the most agile in the 2016 NFL Draft

If you frequent this site, or meander over to Twitter dot com fairly often, you’ve probably seen them.  Leading up to the NFL Draft, it’s difficult not to.  Radar charts. They illustrate how prospect measurables (40 times, bench presses, height, weight, etc.) compare to others in the current and prior year draft classes.  They’re great tools that allow fans to visualize combine and pro day-related attributes both before and after the draft.

The man behind them is Marcus Armstrong (MockDraftable.com).  He meticulously compiles attributes for hundreds of prospects and converts the values into percentile ranks against other prospects in like positions.  Thank him for his genius.

I thought it would be fun to take what Marcus has done and apply it to each team’s draft class.  The result is an "average percentile" for each team, which is an overall average of each draft pick’s percentile rank for each measurable (within each player’s respective position).  In the interactive viz below, the teams are ranked by their selection’s percentiles; the higher the rank, the better the team’s players performed in each measurable, on average, compared to other players in the same position.

The Eagles did pretty well, with an average percentile rank of 58%, good for fifth best in the NFL.  If you hover your mouse over the radar chart, you’ll notice that three measurables in particular stand out: the 20 yard short shuttle (74%), three cone drill (78%, Mike Kaye!), and broad jump (75%).  It’s not clear if this was a strategic focus, but let’s pretend it was.  The Eagles draft picks seem to bring more agility to the roster.

The Future of the Franchise, Carson Wentz, ran his short shuttle in 4.15 seconds, better than 93% of the other QBs in his class.  He also performed better than 86% of the other QBs in the three cone drill, and better than 88% of QBs in the broad jump.  Alex McCalister performed better than most of the other defensive ends in the draft (20ss = 100%, 3 cone = 82%, broad = 100%), Halapoulivaati Vaitai was better than most tackles in the broad jump (93%), Isaac Seumalo outperformed most guards in the short shuttle (100%) and three cone (92%), Jalen Mills did the same (83% each), and Wendell Smallwood’s three cone was better than any other running back in the draft (6.83 seconds).

Also fun to note, Chip Kelly’s 49ers draft class had the second to worst average percentile in this year’s draft (43%).  But take the team average percentiles with a grain of salt.  As Marcus notes, looking at average percentiles isn’t the best way to analyze overall athleticism since many measurables overlap and correlate highly with each other.  However, it’s still cool to see which attributes float to the surface after the dust settles.