Jacob Rodriguez just turned heads at the NFL Combine. A 4.57-second 40-yard dash, a 38.5-inch vertical, and the best three-cone time among all linebackers.
Analysts who had him pegged as a Day 3 pick are now calling him a second-round pick, maybe even a late first.
My question: What did those teams learn in Indianapolis that weren’t already on film?
The answer, supported by decades of research, is almost nothing. In 2025, Rodriguez recorded 128 tackles, 11 tackles for loss, four interceptions, and seven forced fumbles—tying an NCAA single-season record.
He anchored arguably the best defense in D1 and easily the best defense in Red Raider history. Texas Tech led the nation in yards per play allowed and won its first Big 12 championship. Rodriguez swept every major defensive award: the Butkus, Nagurski, Bednarik, and Lombardi. He even finished fifth in Heisman voting as a defensive player.
That resume should have settled his draft stock long before Indianapolis. So why did a few seconds on a stopwatch move the needle more than in a historic season?
Because human nature makes it so. In a 2008 study, Kuzmits and Adams examined whether combined results predicted NFL performance and found “no consistent statistical relationship” between combine tests and professional success. The combine measures raw athleticism in a vacuum.
It does not measure the ability to play football. The researchers recommended teams rely instead on collegiate game performance—what psychologists call a “job sample test.”
The best predictor of how someone will do a job is watching them do the job.
Cade Massey and Richard Thaler’s influential Management Science study, “The Loser’s Curse,” helps explain why teams ignore this evidence.
Massey and Thaler found that NFL teams systematically overvalue their ability to distinguish between players, paying steep prices to move up in the draft for prospects who, on average, deliver less surplus value than cheaper players taken later.
The psychological culprit is overconfidence—and it gets worse with more information.
The NFL combine floods teams with data: exact 40 times, shuttle splits, and vertical measurements. All of it feeds the illusion that scouts can make finer distinctions between players than the evidence supports.
Massey and Thaler found that a drafted player outperforms the next player taken at his position only 52 percent of the time—barely better than a coin flip.
Rodriguez’s case is a textbook example. The only thing that the NFL combine changed is the narrative.
The same player who was “too small” became “undersized but explosive.”
His three-cone drill—completed on his tenth attempt after players kept slipping on the surface—became a testament to toughness.
These are vivid, salient, recent data points overriding the steady accumulation of evidence that came before, exactly the kind of bias behavioral economists have documented for decades.
Rodriguez should be a second-round pick.
But not because of what he did in Indianapolis.
Because of what he did on the field. He was the best defensive player in college football, the heart of a defense that powered Texas Tech to its greatest season in program history.
His quarterback background gives him pre-snap recognition that no drill can measure.
Any team that passes on him in the second round will be making precisely the mistake that Massey, Thaler, and decades of research have warned about: letting measurables cloud what the game itself reveals.
As Massey and Thaler put it: “The problem is not that future performance is difficult to predict, but that decision makers do not appreciate how difficult it is.”
The combine didn’t make Jacob Rodriguez a second-round pick. His game film did. The stopwatch just permitted people to believe it.
James Kemper is a faculty member in the Department of Economics at Texas Tech University, where he teaches Sports Economics.
This article originally appeared on Lubbock Avalanche-Journal: An economist’s argument why Jacob Rodriguez is a top NFL draft pick
Reporting by By James Kemper, special for the Avalanche-Journal / Lubbock Avalanche-Journal
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