Welcome back, its been a long time. When I wrote an article connecting the Green Bay Packers and RAS at Pack To The Future (here’s part 2, part 3, and part 4). I got a lot of push back. Oddly enough from Packers content creators. I was told things like “Its just a coincidence” or “The Packers don’t look players up on Kent’s website”. (Which I never said anyway). Even things like “Gutekunst doesn’t even know what RAS is”.
What is RAS?
First, let’s address what it is to those who may not know. RAS stands for Relative Athletic Score and was created by Kent Lee Platte. This quote is directly from his website
“For the past half decade, I have been working to provide a metric that can easily and intuitively gauge a player’s athletic abilities relative to the position they play and provide tools to contrast and compare based on known measurables”.
Kent Lee Platte, Creator of RAS
Basically he takes any athletic testing a player does from either the combine or their pro day and assigns a numerical value — a value which changes depending on the position they play. He totals it all up and divides it and it gives you a number from 0 – 10. It also rates that player historically to other at his position. You can also assign a percentage to it.
Rashan Gary for example had an RAS score of 9.95. If you turn that into a percentage it gives you 99.5% meaning historically he is a better athlete than 99.5% of all edge rushers who had participated in athletic testing. Now on to the article at hand.
Is It A Coincidence?
At this point, the correlation between the Packers NFL draft choices and RAS is strong enough to go beyond mere coincidence. We have enough data going back to Ted Thompson — and to a lesser extent Ron Wolf — showing the Packers value highly athletic players. Gutekunst has continued that trend. In fact, he has leaned even more into it. 27 of Gutekust’s 39 draft picks that have RAS scores scored 8.0 or higher on the scale.
Do Brian Gutekunst and the Packers Use The RAS Website?
No, of course not. I don’t think anyone ever claimed that. The Packers, like every other team in the league, has their own thresholds or guardrails that they follow. With that being said, no one can deny that the similarities between Kent’s RAS and whatever the Packers use in determining their athletic thresholds for draft picks.
Do Brian Gutekunst and the Packers know what RAS is?
While I don’t have direct knowledge, everything I know and have heard tells me yes. In direct conversations with Kent, he has told me that he has had NFL scouts contact him asking him about his metric and how it works. If you know anything about the NFL scouting community, it’s that it is small and pretty much everyone knows everyone. Which tells me if he has had a few scouts contact him about it and its a small community by now they all must know about it. It just makes sense.
Also scouts don’t do anything, especially contacting a fan, without their GM knowing about and approving it. NFL front offices are in the business about knowing everything about a player. They can tell you who his 3rd grade teacher was and what kind of grades he got. If they know that, they have to know what RAS is.
In my next article I will be updating their thresholds based off of just Brian Gutekunst draft picks. You can also find anything else I have written about the Packers, RAS, or anything else for ATB here.
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