NFL Draft 2015: 8 instant reactions
By Will Osgood
The Seahawks Are All In on Analytics
If you’re not familiar with SPARQ, here’s the best quick summary possible: It looks at player’s height/weight, speed and agility scores from the NFL Combine or other pre-draft workouts and puts them into a formula to match them against fellow athletes in the draft and all time.
It was discovered last year that the Seattle Seahawks under general manager John Schneider and Pete Carroll used this formula for their draft and undrafted free agent targets—which helped them uncover such gems as Richard Sherman, Brandon Browner, Kam Chancellor and Malcolm Smith—the Super Bowl MVP of a year ago—to name some of the most prominent examples.
In this draft, the Seahawks eschewed off-field character issues to take Michigan’s Frank Clark with their first pick of the draft in the second-round, No. 63 overall. Clark is known as an athletic freak.
Their second pick in the third-round was Tyler Lockett—a good football player certainly—but also a speed demon. Sure he only ranked 81st among wide receivers in the SPARQ formula, but he is mostly penalized because of his 5’9” frame.
It’s far from surprising that the two offensive linemen they took were fourth among offensive linemen, Marc Glowinski of West Virginia, and 51st, Terry Poole of San Diego State.
Defensive back picks—Tye Smith of Towson and Ryan Murphy of Oregon State—were 25th and second respectively at their position (Murphy was listed pre-draft as a safety).
Meanwhile Buffalo’s Kristjan Sokoli was the Seahawks’ highest SPARQ scorer, and not just the Seahawks’ highest scorer but has the highest SPARQ score ever.
Finally, Oregon State “EDGE” Obum Gwacham scored 121.7 which ranked him 25th among all “EDGE” players and last among all Seahawks draft picks. Yet overall that’s still a great score.
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