Doug Brown talks prospects
Courtesy Winnipeg Free Press:
For as long as there have been two professional football leagues in North America, coaches, players and fans have argued over what makes the American NCAA football recruit, for the most part, a superior entity to his Canadian collegiate counterpart.
Now that the CFL evaluation camp wrapped up on Sunday in Toronto, it’s time to see whether the physical measures — on which these rookies in the NFL and CFL combines were tested extensively — are the biggest components separating these prospects or whether it has more to do with the coaching and competition indices at their respective levels.
Before we begin to compare and contrast these statistics it’s important to note at least two differences. First and foremost, the NFL combine tested no less than 333 athletes in Indianapolis in February of this year. The CFL evaluation camp that ran Friday, Saturday and Sunday last week in Toronto looked at a whopping 52. So with over six times the depth of players to examine, you would expect to see the NFL combine prospects dominate most or all of the categories — though you may be surprised with the results. Furthermore, when it comes to 40-yard times, though the distances are the same, and they were both run on variations of field turf, there is no discounting the fact that the surfaces were not identical — and in this case let’s hope the surface in Toronto was akin to slow-drying cement in order to explain the monumental disparity in the 40 times.
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