NFL Scouting Combine 2020 Day 1 recap: Hands were measured

The Combine kicked off in earnest yesterday with the most august tradition imaginable: Hand measurements.

There are many useful things to be gleaned from the workouts and measurements at the Combine, certainly, but teams and analysts who are too reliant on them usually suffer for it. The focus on hand size for quarterbacks is probably the most consistently hilarious and misguided thing that comes out of Combine week, though, and that’s saying something.

Yesterday’s brouhaha concerned the hands of one Joe Burrow, the reigning Heisman winner and one of the most productive college quarterbacks in recent memory. There are reasons to question whether Burrow will be an elite quarterback at the next level—his final season’s production was out of step with the rest of his collegiate career, he’s not necessarily an elite thrower, he’s probably going to the Bengals, etc.—but the fact that he has the smallest hand size of any 1st-round projected quarterback since 2008 will undoubtedly set off some minor but real alarm bells across the league.

Burrow at least took being the biggest news on a slow day in stride.

Stay tuned for more interesting things ahead once we start getting workouts, reports of Atlanta’s interest in prospects, and more.