Jack Marucci was watching the 2020 NFL Draft like everybody else. Nestled into his couch. Monitoring the timer on the bottom of the screen. And thinking about who he’d pick if he were on the clock.
Marucci preferred one specific subset of prospects. After all, the longtime LSU athletic trainer was coming off the Tigers’ 2019 national championship season, and when you’re taping the ankles of players who lead you to the pinnacle of a sport, it’s hard to be impartial.
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Like plenty of others, Marucci was a big believer in Joe Burrow, who went No. 1 to Cincinnati. But Marucci was biased toward several others, too — none more than Justin Jefferson. Before the draft, Marucci told a buddy who worked for an NFL team that Jefferson was a can’t-miss talent.
The receiver caught 111 passes for 1,540 yards and 18 touchdowns in the most difficult conference in college football the previous season, but there were questions about his size, his straight-line speed and his physicality. And what about the fact that he was primarily a slot receiver in a class loaded with players who played more outside?
These doubts littered the minds of evaluators and were evident the night of the draft when fellow receivers Henry Ruggs, Jerry Jeudy, CeeDee Lamb and Jalen Reagor were all taken before Jefferson went to the Vikings at pick No. 22.
In the years since, as Jefferson developed into a superstar who has accomplished more in his first three seasons than any receiver in NFL history, Marucci has looked on proudly.
“I always thought you were crazy,” Marucci’s friend who works in the NFL told him. “I don’t know how you knew.”
Marucci tends to say he “just had a sense,” but that’s not the entire truth. That feeling was backed by cutting-edge cognitive and visual data testifying to Jefferson’s uniqueness, information that informed Marucci’s view of Jefferson’s ultimate potential and altered how he feels about how players are evaluated and coached across all sports.
For as long as Marucci can remember, the 40-yard dash, vertical leap, bench press and other traditional athletic tests have driven pre-draft narratives. “You get seduced,” he said, “by the fastest, the tallest, the biggest, the strongest.”
Marucci, 59, believes those traits have value. But he has long been curious about quantifying what we cannot see.
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His curiosity stems from decades of experience. A native of Uniontown, Pa., Marucci adored Pittsburgh sports as a youth. That love, combined with a mild interest in the medical field, led him to become an athletic trainer.
Before spending time around LSU’s national championship-winning teams in 2003 and 2007, Marucci attended West Virginia, completed a graduate stint at Alabama, then found himself at Florida State in the 1990s, where he worked with players like Deion Sanders, Charlie Ward and Warrick Dunn.
He was particularly interested in two kinds of players: can’t-miss prospects who were athletic but failed to perform on the field and under-the-radar talents who didn’t have elite size, strength or speed but still managed to excel.
By the 2010s, Marucci wanted to delve deeper, to see if he could transform some of the subjective beliefs about players’ character traits and cognitive abilities into objective insight.
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Around that time, Brandon Ally and Scott Wylie were fixated on a related idea. Both former college athletes, Ally and Wylie had worked with Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s patients, studying how humans perceive and process information.
When they watched the 2014 NFL Draft, they wondered if they could tweak the existing tests that helped them understand these degenerative diseases and apply that knowledge to sports. What if they could quantify a player’s ability to process information on the field?
The NFL has long tried to quantify intelligence. The Wonderlic test, created in 1937, consists of multiple-choice questions that must be answered within a time limit. The 10-part Athletic Intelligence Quotient (AIQ) test, first administered in 2012, measures athletic cognitive skills. Ally and Wylie sought something different — a quick test that did not allow for reasoning and forced the athlete to make instinctual decisions without thinking.
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They started a company called S2 Cognition. Once it was launched, they contracted teams — like LSU — to vet their product. Ally met Marucci, who peppered him with endless questions: What positions would likely score best on the test? More importantly, for which positions did the score actually matter?
Quarterback was obvious. Players at football’s most important position absorb huge swaths of information before the snap, then must verify that information post-snap. It would be a benefit to know which players filtered information the best. In February, The Athletic’s Matt Barrows detailed how Iowa State’s Brock Purdy put up an elite S2 score last offseason before being thrust into the 49ers’ starting job.
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As Marucci began to see the scores, he was taken aback. Good cornerbacks and receivers performed better than most. The more he thought about why — they have to quickly make decisions and improvise when things don’t go as planned — the more he understood about players who had long piqued his interest.
Former LSU stars Deion Jones and Jalen Mills developed from three-star prospects into NFL mainstays. Neither possessed explosive athleticism, but both seemed to have something that helped them thrive at the highest level of the sport.
By the time Jefferson arrived on campus, Marucci was sold on S2’s value. Each Tigers player took the 30- to 45-minute test, and Jefferson, a skinny two-star recruit from just outside New Orleans who arrived late to camp, scored in the 91st percentile in a database normed to NFL players. Furthermore, he tested well in three categories integral for many successful receivers: search efficiency, decision complexity and improvisation.
“It was like, ‘Holy s—, he is off the charts,'” Ally said. “He can see the field really well. He can find space. He can filter through if/then rules very quickly. And then he can improvise, not only finding alternatives but also making in-flight adjustments. When he leaves the ground, he can adjust his body to a poorly thrown ball.”
The numbers confirmed eye tests from Marucci and the LSU staff. So did another eye test.
If you stepped inside LSU’s indoor practice facility one afternoon in the summer of 2019, you would have witnessed some of the best receivers in college football catching passes while wearing a pair of $14,000 glasses.
They were no fashion statement, but an experiment testing another of Marucci’s hypotheses: that a player’s vision is crucial to his performance. The glasses worn by Jefferson and others featured two cameras that recorded information — such as the expansion of the wearer’s pupils and the sequencing of his eyes as they track down a pass — in real time.
Marucci’s fascination with ocular dominance stems from the business he founded crafting wooden bats for some of the best baseball players in the world. Marucci Sports, which produces bats used by Bryce Harper, Anthony Rizzo and others, was started years ago when, at age 8, Marucci’s baseball-loving son Gino asked for a wooden bat his own size.
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Marucci purchased a secondhand lathe, retreated to his toolshed and surfaced with a piece of equipment that eventually catapulted him into the highest echelons of the sport via word of mouth. During his time away from his day job, he would travel to spring training, set up shop behind a hitter like Albert Pujols and talk with him about what he was feeling, hearing — and seeing.
“And I wanted to know, how do you quantify that?” Marucci said. “When we can quantify something and give the information, you really don’t have to say much.”
Marucci was willing to try to find a way to obtain data, even if LSU staffers looked at him funny. He was alerted to a company called Tobii Pro, which develops hardware for eye tracking. Through Tobii Pro, Marucci met Mike Mann, a former volleyball player and volunteer assistant at the University of Florida whose fascination with eye tracking spurred him to launch his own consulting firm.
Mann, also an expert in home renovation, had long been committed to figuring out how things worked. As a boy, he took apart and reassembled Nintendo Game Boys to understand the technology. The idea of understanding how elite athletes visualized the world was too enticing not to pursue.
“I was like, ‘This is a gold mine of data,'” Mann said. “Like, ‘You are kidding me that nobody has ever looked at this.'”
Mann spoke Marucci’s language, so Marucci invited him to Baton Rouge, where they utilized Tobii Pro technology to record hundreds of thousands of data points on 15 pass catchers. Distilling the data helped Mann identify which receivers might be more productive than others on different routes from certain locations or sides of the field based on their ocular strengths.
The information helped some receivers eliminate drops — tight end Thaddeus Moss, for example, did not register a single one for LSU in 2019. And the data solidified some coaches’ decisions, such as keeping Jefferson in the slot.
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Elite athletes, Ally said, tend to have minimal degrees of eye dominance, meaning both eyes absorb information for the brain to process. Jefferson, though, is a unicorn — nearly one of one. Marucci said Jefferson has the ability to change his eye dominance depending on the type and direction of the route he is running.
“I’ve tested a lot of guys now,” Marucci said. “He’s the only one who I have seen who can do that.”
In June 2021, LSU elevated Marucci to director of performance innovation, a position believed to be the first of its kind in college athletics. Essentially, Marucci serves the role of a point guard, deciphering sports science information and dishing it out to any coach or athlete in need.
Marucci recently received a phone call from a staffer who works with one of the school’s golf teams. One of their elite players was having trouble reading putts. They wondered if Marucci could find anything in his biometric data that explained why.
He noticed the golfer’s eye dominance favored one side. He then asked the staffer how the golfer read putts. The resulting coaching point was not a different putter but a minor shift in positioning toward the dominant eye.
This is relevant in football, too, Marucci said. “If a guy struggles catching the ball, you can track them and try to uncover the why.”
Similarly, if a guy always seems to make the correct play, Marucci thinks it’s worth pursuing information that explains his abilities. Which brings him back to the players whose production exceeded what their athleticism metrics indicated was possible.
Take Jarvis Landry, for example. The former LSU receiver ran a 4.77 40-yard dash at the 2014 NFL Scouting Combine. Marucci can still hear the comments from evaluators. How in the hell is that guy going to get open in the NFL?
This was before S2 Cognition and before LSU football tested for eye dominance. Marucci, though, had a feeling. He marveled at Landry’s ability to accelerate and decelerate. Marucci also knew Landry loved the game to a degree that he would commit himself to mastering technique.
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“And guess what?” Marucci said. “He’s still playing.”
Marucci noticed similar elements with Jefferson.
The time Jefferson spent with legendary receivers coach Jerry Sullivan stood out. So did the way he navigated a Week 4 MCL sprain against Vanderbilt in 2019. Marucci thought Jefferson had no chance to play in the team’s next game, but Jefferson rehabbed — then played — at a level (nine catches for 155 yards and two touchdowns) that propelled then-LSU head coach Ed Orgeron to tell Marucci: “You guys are pretty good.”
“I go, ‘I’m not that good,'” Marucci said. “‘This guy made us look good.'”
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Jefferson’s enthusiasm mattered, as did his willingness to seek out training from elite coaches. Add those characteristics to what Marucci knew was under Jefferson’s hood, and you’ll find a man who knew The Catch was possible.
JUSTIN JEFFERSON ASDGJSKDNFGKSDF;K
📺: https://t.co/uRjde5F169 pic.twitter.com/sxiLVx0NCi
— NFL (@NFL) November 13, 2022
The one this past season in Buffalo, on fourth-and-18, where Jefferson left the ground, navigated visual chaos, contorted his body, leaped backward mid-flight and hauled the pass in.
The one that had the play-by-play announcer mystified and asking one question: “How?”
Marucci had an answer.
(Illustration: Sean Reilly / The Athletic; Photos courtesy of LSU Athletics)