Can biometrics help NFL teams spot the next Brock Purdy?

As the NFL draft winds down on Saturday and the rookie free agent signing period kicks off, teams are on the clock to find the next Brock Purdy. San Francisco closed last year’s show after taking the 23-year-old quarterback with the 262nd and final pick on the board, a distinction that comes with the unfortunate nickname Mr Irrelevant. But when franchise QBs Jimmy Garoppolo and Trey Lance were both knocked out late last season, it fell to the Iowa State product to keep the 49ers’ playoff fortunes alive. All he did was win his first seven starts and lead San Francisco to the NFC championship game while posting the best rookie passer rating since Kurt Warner’s Cinderella Super Bowl run.

Now that Purdy has the 49ers moving on from Garoppolo and cooling on the idea of moving ahead with Lance (the enigmatic 2021 third overall draft selection that came at a significant cost to the team’s long-term future), pro talent evaluators are rushing to point out how, actually, they had Purdy pegged all along as Mr Relevant. Never mind if Steve Gara is among the few people who can say he saw clear signs of Purdy’s future success. “Even though he was in plain sight, to the NFL community, he was a hidden gem,” Gara says.

An ex-Marine turned sports analytics boffin, Gera found his way to the San Diego Chargers front office as NFL teams were sweeping for data nerds in the early aughts, as the Oakland A’s were proving the value of advanced statistics. While there and at the Cleveland Browns, he helped build a system for tracking biometrics but thought it unfair that players didn’t have an easy way to carry that data on to other clubs or effectively analyze it themselves.

So in 2020 he co-founded BreakAway, a clearinghouse that makes biometrics as portable and processable as a medical record. On the BreakAway app, players can track their training and practice sessions and game play along with sleep cycles and general work habits. It’s like FitBit for serious athletes in all sports, whether they’re going pro or going out for varsity, offering a more complete scouting profile than ever. And that’s just the ground floor.

BreakAway takes that process to the next level with Field Labs, a kind of advanced self-scout. Using cutting edge motion capture equipment, Field Labs videos football players as they grind through a series of position-specific drills, not the track-style stuff they’re often judged by at grander auditions like the NFL combine. “The standard tests tell you how much of a pure athlete someone might be for those specific events,” Gera says. “But it doesn’t really tell you what kind of football player they are.”

The idea is to measure how players execute the most fundamental techniques when they play – if a quarterback moves his hips, trunk, elbow and shoulder in sequence before finally releasing the ball, etc. Last season was BreakAway’s second trialing the biometrics tracking process at the East West Shrine Bowl, a high-traffic and much scrutinized showcase for college seniors entering the NFL draft. It’s totally on the player if they want to opt-in. Purdy – degraded out of the box for playing at a low-end Power 5 school where his teams barely broke even – figured a more detailed analysis couldn’t hurt.

On his official NFL scouting report Purdy received a grade of 5.57, just seven-hundredths off the bare minimum rating. Worse, scouts gave him an athleticism score of 65 – good for 11th among the 18 quarterbacks scouted. “So far off it’s not even funny,” Gera cracks. All of it makes Purdy seem lucky to be drafted at all.

To Gera and his team, it was immediately obvious that Purdy had the height (6ft 1in) and heft (212lbs) to excel at the next level. And then his mechanics really jumped out. “He was in sequence every single time,” Gera recalls. “Just absolutely phenomenal sequencing, high percentile across the board in just about everything he was doing.”

And though Purdy didn’t get much opportunity in the Shrine Bowl to distinguish himself, he did get the take his biomechanical data with him and use it to prepare for his pro day showcase at Iowa State. Meanwhile, Gera and his team, in collaboration with East West organizers, translated their advanced data into proper scouting evaluations, including Purdy’s high-rated assessment, and disseminated their findings across the league. “We still to this day don’t know which teams used it and which ones didn’t,” Gera says. “But we have some guesses.”

What’s more, there’s no telling for certain whether the teams that overlooked BreakAway’s player reviews did so because they had too much information already or because they had already made their decisions. And even if there were other teams that were sweet on Purdy, he still wasn’t drafted until the very end.

For the record, Purdy wasn’t the only diamond in the rough that BreakAway caught last year. They were equally bullish on Jack Sanborn, an all-conference linebacker out of Wisconsin who went undrafted. The Bears signed him a week later, and he wound up finishing sixth on the team in tackles despite missing the remaining three games of the 2022 season with an ankle injury. Pro Football Focus named him to its all-rookie team.

This year it’s safety Trey Dean III and offensive tackle Theo Benedet who headline BreakAway’s list of breakout prospects. Despite Dean’s meaningful contributions to the Florida Gators defense over a five-year career, pro scouts have him pegged as practice squad fodder. His athleticism in particular didn’t really turn up under traditional pre-draft physical challenges. But when BreakAway ran him through Field Labs testing, Dean didn’t just blow them away with how easily he moves his hips (a telltale sign of a top-shelf safety), his measurable ability to change directions ranked in the top 1% of football players BreakAway had ever tested – college or pro.

Benedet is an even more curious case – a 6ft 7in, 300lb Canadian who played collegiately in British Columbia, well off the beaten path of the amateur football scene. When BreakAway put him through the paces at the Shrine Bowl, his footwork and physicality earned outstanding grades from BreakAway. Meanwhile, on NFL.com, Benedet doesn’t even have a scouting profile. “He’s the sort of guy the Patriots would draft,” Gera says of Benedet, a seventh rounder if he’s lucky. Gera reckons that if all evaluators were as thorough as BreakAway, Benedet wouldn’t have lasted past the second round.

And therein lies the stubborn problem with scouting. Even after almost eight decades of refinement, it remains an inexact science practiced by men trained to trust their eyes and guts – crazy, given the hundreds of millions teams have invested in player personnel nowadays. BreakAway isn’t the magic bullet, but it does offer teams something else they can arm themselves with to limit costly signings, suss out more Mr Relevants and, well, not be quite so hidebound and hindsighted as a matter of course.

“I heard an NFL scout anonymously the other day talking about how smart Brock is,” Gera says. “It’s true, but no one was talking about that last year. But he gets the benefit of the doubt now that he’s proven that he can do it at the most absolutely elite level.”