New England Patriots: Ranking New England’s 4 most athletic players

There are a lot of great players on the New England Patriots’ roster but which are the most athletic for their position? The answer might surprise you.

Ahead of each NFL draft, Zach Whitman (@zjwhitman) of Three Sigma Athlete releases SPARQ scores of the class’ draftable prospects.

What’s a SPARQ score? 3sigmaathlete.com’s ‘SPARQ Documentation‘ page defines it as:

"“a formula developed by Nike which measures player athleticism by outputting a single composite score.”"

According to the site’s ‘FAQ‘ page, the factors used to determine a player’s score are “weight, forty-yard dash, ten-yard split, short shuttle, 3-cone drill, bench press, vertical jump, and broad jump.” When deciding between Scouting Combine and Pro Day results, “[Whitman] take[s] the better result and combine[s] the two performances.”

"To differentiate a good score from a bad one,”[Whitman] calculated positional pSPARQ statistics which allow us to calculate the player’s standing relative to peers in terms of z-score. A 0 z-score would mean a player is average, while a 2.0 would mean he’s two standard deviations above the peer average.” Additionally, the site notes, ““NFL%” and “z-score” columns refer to the NFL positional averages and not to the draft positional averages. This means that a 0.0 z-score and 50.0 percentile would represent a player who rates as a league-average NFL athlete at the position.”"

With this tool, discovering the athleticism of the league’s top players is easier than ever before. Based on their SPARQ scores, these are the four most athletic members of the New England Patriots.