NFL Combine legends who never lived up to the hype

We know that Xavier Worthy broke the land speed record during his combine when he ran a 4.21 40-yard dash. He’s been a disappointment for the Kansas City Chiefs. We know that Anthony Richardson had the best combine and accomplished athletic feats unknown to the human physique. He can’t find the field in Indianapolis. 

That’s because standardized tests are dumb. Everyone knows someone who got straight As, a 36 on the ACT, or a 1600 on the SAT, but they were a total ding-dong. Just because you do good on a test doesn’t mean you're a shoo-in for success. That’s the same thing with the NFL Combine. Every year, some players look like superheroes and end up being just a guy. It turns out, jumping high, running fast and turning on a dime are important, but they’re not everything.

Gerald Sensabaugh, safety

The vertical jump might be the worst event to dominate, because every single jump looks ridiculously high to the naked eye. On Thursday, Sonny Styles jumped out of the gym with a 43.5-inch vertical, but that was still 2.5 inches shorter than Gerald Sensabaugh’s record-setting 46-inch jump back in 2005. 

Sensabaugh not only crushed the vert, but he also had a very, very solid 133-inch broad jump (96th percentile), and he ran a 4.44-second 40-yard dash (89th percentile). For a safety, running fast, jumping high and being explosive are really good traits. 

He ended up getting drafted by the Jacksonville Jaguars in the fifth round and played eight years in the league. That’s really good, but was he a star? No. If you search his name on Twitter, he’s more of a ‘Name a random football player’ kind of guy.

Jordan Thomas, Cornerback

There were two Jordan Thomases in the 2018 draft class, and both of them did pretty well in their own right. However, this Jordan Thomas is the one who broke the record for the three-cone agility drill at 6.28 seconds. The problem is that he apparently really only trained for that, because he also only had four reps on the bench press, which is a bottom one-percentile performance. 

The Philadelphia Eagles signed him as a free agent in May of 2018 and waived him three days later. Let it be a lesson that you shouldn’t actually min-max in real life. 

John Ross and Rondel Menendez, wide receivers

If you watch the Combine on TV, chances are that you’re only there to see the 40-yard dash and then change the channel. There’s nothing wrong with that; it’s the same as watching the 100-yard dash in the Summer Olympics and then turning it off when they go to the shot put. It’s easy to understand speed.

Up until a couple of years ago, when Xavier Worthy broke the 40-yard dash record, John Ross held it at 4.22 seconds. Before him, it was Chris Johnson and Rondel Mendez who held the record at 4.24 seconds. 

Of these four guys, Johnson is the only one who was a running back, and he also became one of the nine players in history to rush for more than 2,000 yards. Running backs and wide receivers have two entirely different skill sets, and speed is much more important for receivers, but I will concede that a lot of CJ2K’s success was due to his insane speed.

Regardless, Ross and Menendez both broke the record in their respective combines, and both of them went on to be duds. In 1999, Menendez was drafted by the Falcons in the seventh round of the Draft, hurt his knee in the preseason, bounced around practice squads for a couple of years, played in NFL Europe, and then retired to take care of his sick mom. 

John Ross was different. The Bengals drafted him ninth overall in the 2017 draft. He ended up playing only 17 snaps and having one touch the entire season; it was really bad and really weird. 

Unfortunately for him, and for everyone else who prides themselves on being fast, that rookie season was just a microcosm of his career: In the five seasons from 2017 to 2021, he played in 38 total games and had 63 catches for 963 yards and 11 touchdowns. Then, he retired for a couple seasons, came back in 2024 with the Eagles, and had one catch in the Week 4 game against the Buccaneers when A.J. Brown and DeVonta Smith were hurt.

Now he’s a wide receiver on the Birmingham Stallions, the UFL team being coached by A.J. McCarron. So, probably not the career he thought he’d have when he was the fastest dude in the land.

Stephen Paea, defensive tackle

The bench press is a weird combine workout because we’ve learned that it pretty much means nothing. So it makes sense that a lot of guys opt out of doing it… but on the other hand, it’s the bench press and you want to see guys do it because it’s awesome to see big guys lift big weights. 

In 2011, Stephen Paea set the record for bench press reps at the combine at 49, which is crazy. He was pushing weight for a minute straight. 

He ended up getting drafted by the Bears in the second round, hanging around the league for seven years, playing for four different teams, and making a cool $15 million during his career. That’s a solid career, but it’s not star-worthy. You have to imagine that if he ended up being a stud, there would be fewer dudes who opt out of it, but here we are.