The NFL Draft’s Best Athlete Is Also Its Greatest Enigma

Kent Lee Platte is a former Navy cryptologist who also happens to be one of the most useful people decoding one of the NFL draft’s biggest puzzles: Why a quarterback named Anthony Richardson, who had a completely forgettable college career, is one of the hottest prospects in the sport. 

When Platte applied his coding wizardry to football, he invented a metric that crunches a host of pre-draft testing data into a single number for every player. His formula takes information like how fast a player runs and how high he jumps and distills it into what he calls a Relative Athletic Score, a nifty grade that’s popular among draft pundits and helpful for quantifying someone’s traits compared with his peers.