A really gifted scout once told me that the tools show up on the field, but athleticism shows up in the milliseconds. The problem, for the better part of a century of American scouting, is that we never had a clean way to measure the athlete. We eyeballed it. We wrote "loose," we wrote "electric," we wrote "quick-twitch" and hoped the reader trusted our eyes. And all of those subjective means of measuring a prospect still exist, and still hold a ton of value in the scouting community. There's a reason we don't draft players exclusively off spreadsheets.
But this piece is about those spreadsheets. It's about data players have put onto paper. This piece is about measuring the athlete. This is all about measuring twitch.
To rank them, we're using a number our board leans on every cycle: Reactive Strength Index. Before we get to the names, let's talk …