Former Eagles DE Mike Mamula once famously exploited the NFL Combine to boost his draft stock
Mike Mamula played 5 seasons for the Philadelphia Eagles in the NFL.
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The NFL Combine is an important process in evaluating the athletes’ talents and potential. Just last season, the Jacksonville Jaguars drafted DE Travon Walker with the 1st overall pick ahead of guys like Aidan Hutchinson and Kayvon Thibodeaux just because of his remarkable outing in the Combine. So, putting up a tremendous performance in Combine will help that particular person to boost his draft stock in the NFL Draft and one athlete in 1995 used this fact to his advantage by exploiting the Combine.
The former Boston College defensive end Mike Mamula was a good player, but he was not a first-round draft prospect. In 1995, when he entered the NFL Draft, he was projected to go in the mid-to-late rounds on the NFL Draft. But Mamula pulled a trick up his sleeve. Since the events and the drills in the NFL Combine are the same every year, the 6’3″ defensive end hired coaches to specifically train him for those drills.
And surprisingly, it worked out well for the defensive player. He crushed that year’s NFL Combine. The talented athlete had a 38.5-inch vertical and exploded for a 4.58 time in the 40-yard dash. Furthermore, he also pressed 225 pounds 26 times, all of which indicated him as an elite athlete and boosted his draft prospect. In the end, Mamula was drafted as the 7th overall player in the 1995 NFL Draft by the Philadelphia Eagles.
“I went into the combine having done every test hundreds of times while some other guys had never done some of the specific drills,” Mamula told ESPN in 2008 regarding his preparations for the Combine.
Mike Mamula played in five seasons in the NFL
Mike Mamula went from a third-round prospect to a Top 10 draft pick just because of his remarkable outing in the NFL Combine. So, how well did he fare in the league as a defensive end?
Well, Mamula spent five years in the league, and they were all with the Philadelphia-based football team. The talented defensive end racked up 31.5 sacks in those five seasons, but not a single Pro Bowl or other individual awards.
Furthermore, Mamula was forced to retire after the 2000 season due to injuries. It was actually quite a decent career for an NFL player that isn’t drafted in the first round of the Draft. If the DE was drafted in the later rounds, he would’ve been considered a decent player. But since the Eagles had to give up a lot to draft him, he is now considered a bust around the league.
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Aravind Raj
(2075 Articles Published)