Did These Draft Prospects Shapeshift In Between the Senior Bowl and Combine?

The art of measurements, plus an overall spiel about data integrity

A lot can change in 27 days. The name of the month, stock pricese, your weight, and even the size of your hands apparently. The NFL Combine measurements are slowly rolling in and before publishing my next mock draft with new and improved comparisons, I wanted to conduct a dimensional analysis on players who were measured at both the Senior Bowl on February 1st and the Combine last weekend. The results may leave you questioning gravity itself, or just accuracies of tape measures and the human eye.

We are going to look existentially at simple measurements to see what or who we can actually trust. Let’s dive into some players who had extremely large differences in their combine and senior bowl measurements.

Jalen Milroe

Milroe’s been all over the news this week because his hands magically increased in size. Why is Milroe the only person catching any flak for this though? Did he somehow cheat the combine? Or did he hire a hand size consultant? Maybe he had a French tip manicure at the combine. This write-up formed as an idea partly because of this weird Milroe discourse surrounding his hands.

Is hand size the least-accurate measurement at the combine? Let’s analyze other outliers to see.

Dillon Gabriel

This chart for Oregon QB Dillon Gabriel is just hilarious. The lefty didn’t have a single percentile change in his senior bowl and combine measurements…except for hand size.

Damien Martinez

Whoa! Looks like Miami RB Damien Martinez also hired Jalen Milroe’s hand size consultant and/or manicurist.

Shemar Stewart

Texas A&M DE Shemar Stewart also displayed a significant percentile difference in between his hand sizes at the senior bowl and combine.

Isaac Teslaa

Arkansas WR Isaac Teslaa had a crazy height difference between the senior bowl and combine:

Although it was only a +2.1% difference in percentile, he measured in at 6’2 and 7/8 inches at the senior bowl. At the combine he was 6’4. Did Teslaa hit a growth spurt? Honestly, probably.

Comparing the Measurements

Here are the measurements ranked from highest to lowest percent difference among all prospects who were measured at the 2025 senior bowl and 2025 combine:

1. Weight: 1.87%

2. Hand Size: 1.86%

3. Arm Length: 1.36%

4. Height: 0.48%

When you look at the numbers in this format, it becomes apparent that the difference doesn’t really matter at all. Obviously weight is the category with the biggest difference since weight is both the measurement most in the prospect’s control and the most likely to fluctuate. The raw numbers for weight look like large differences, for example Princely Umanmielen weighed 244lbs at the combine and 264lbs at the senior bowl. But scaling the numbers down to the same plane helps quell these combine integrity issues.

Data Primary Sources

As someone who waited with baited breath last weekend for every Daniel Jeremiah tweet with new prospect measurements, I feel like a good authority to speak on the idea of data as a whole and where it comes from. Especially when it comes to things like these categorical measurements for prospects, how much of it can we trust and what can we do to increase its reliability?

For example, I had to get the senior bowl measurements for this write-up from this link from The 33rd Team. There was nowhere else with these measurements for free as far as I scanned online. After that, I imported the data into Excel and ran some replacements on it to standardize the formatting (ex: 6’4”1/2 changed to 75.5in). Just for a second, think about the long and arduous journey a simple height measurement for a college football player took before it landed in your lap.

1. The measurement occurred at the senior bowl.

2. Someone marked down that measurement.

3. Tyler Brooke, an NFL analyst covering the senior bowl for The 33rd Team, wrote that measurement down or received a sheet of all the measurements.

4. Brooke then published the measurements in the form of a table online.

5. I downloaded the data.

6. I standardized the data, comparing it to another NFL Draft Combine dataset from another source that also includes pro day data, which iterates over step 1 again back to here. And I arbitrarily cut the combine data in the year 2008.

7. I uploaded the data.

8. And its final stop: I am showing you this data on my Substack.

Every single data point is like a game of whisper down the lane. What if Brooke mistyped a weight as 6 foot 5 instead of 6 foot 4 and doesn’t notice it until tomorrow? What if I messed up one of my find and replaces? What if all the players were measured at the senior bowl in alphabetical order consecutively so the supervisors eyes started to speed things up in order to finish quicker?

To account for things like this, we can create a Q-Q plot to compare the differences in senior bowl and combine measurements for 2025 to each other.

These graphs essentially mean that the height and hand size measurements tail off at the ends of the distributions of differences, but not to a serious degree. If the measurements were genuinely flawed, we would expect a graph more S-shaped than anything we’re looking at here.

Long story short: You can trust measurements at the NFL Draft Combine. And at the end of the day, they’re just measurements. Jalen Milroe isn’t palming a basketball for 24 hours a day in between the senior bowl and combine to game the numbers and make his hands bigger.

Data collection, data science, and data visualization are all forms of art and storytelling in their own different ways. It’s more about illusions than people usually think. Here’s a Q-Q plot that looks more like a modern art piece:

Wait, this plot implies that hand size has the least-normal distribution among the 4 measurements. Maybe there is something wrong with hand size measurements! But our sample size was only 130 players, so it’s impossible to draw a conclusion about the integrity of measuring hands at the NFL Draft Combine from such a small dataset.

Let mw know what you think about all of this in the comments below. I will be back next week with another mock draft. Thank you!