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In Step With the Competition
Bartell Is Confident Heading Into Combine

By Mark Maske
Washington Post Staff Writer
Friday, February 25, 2005; Page D01

INDIANAPOLIS, Feb. 24 --

Ronald Bartell will arrive here on Saturday, ready to be measured and examined and questioned and psychoanalyzed by the men who decide which college football players will be giddy and which will be disappointed come NFL draft weekend in April. Professional prestige, national acclaim and millions of dollars are on the line, and Bartell is a mostly unknown cornerback from Howard University trying to prove his mettle alongside more celebrated prospects from high-profile college programs such as Auburn and Miami.

If he is the least bit overwhelmed, he isn't admitting it. "I'm not nervous," Bartell said Thursday. "I'm real excited. I know I'm a pretty good athlete. I think I match up well. A lot of the top cornerbacks in the draft are training where I'm training. We kind of sized each other up when we got out here, and I knew I could hang in there and compete with them pretty well."


Despite being a mostly unknown cornerback from Howard, Ronald Bartell is confident as he prepares for the NFL scouting combine. (Tom Story - For The Washington Post)

He is being touted as one of the draft's possible surprises, a player yet to be introduced to the general football-watching public who could be selected in the second round if he fares well during the evaluation process that began at the Senior Bowl all-star game last month in Mobile, Ala., continues with the NFL scouting combine that runs through early next week here and culminates with prospects' pro-day workouts for coaches, scouts and front-office executives on individual college campuses in March and early April.

"I'm just taking it day by day," Bartell said. "The draft is such a funny thing. I'm trying to keep a level head. I don't want to get my expectations way up, and then maybe get let down. But I think with a good showing at the combine, I can hear my name called early in the second round."

Players no longer just prepare for the draft. They prepare for the draft preparations. For Bartell, that means working out six days per week at Athletes' Performance, a training facility in Tempe, Ariz., that is readying him for the tasks he will be asked to perform by NFL talent evaluators.

He gets to the facility at 8 a.m. and works out in the morning, then takes a lunch break and works out again in the afternoon. He has been tutored by former NFL general managers about how to handle the interviews with individual teams that will take place at the combine, and he has taken several warmup versions of the Wonderlic intelligence test to which the draft prospects are subjected.

"You pretty much know what all the questions are going to be" during the interviews, Bartell said by telephone from Arizona. "There might be a couple curveballs, but I don't expect to be surprised by too many questions. I think I've taken the Wonderlic test six or seven times."

He will have to prove he can handle the step up in competition from Howard to the NFL. Bartell says when he decided to transfer from Central Michigan to Howard midway through his collegiate career, he figured the pro scouts would find him if he was good enough. He was right.

"It still comes down to doing your evaluations, and how do you feel about the kid as a player and as a person," Carolina Panthers General Manager Marty Hurney said here Thursday. "There are players everywhere. It's our job to find them. You have to trust what you see. Obviously level of competition will come up when you talk about a player, but you have to go by what you see. He won't be discussed any differently by us than someone who played at Nebraska."

Said former Dallas Cowboys executive Gil Brandt, who now works for the league: "It doesn't matter where you came from. People here just want to see how fast you are, see how you look going through the drills and get their evaluations on you."

Bartell says he's doing his best to avoid paying attention to draft-buildup media reports, some of which were uncomplimentary about his showings during the heavily scrutinized Senior Bowl practices.

"You can't get caught up in the draft hype," Bartell said. "If you read some of the things that are written about you on the Internet, you'd think I got embarrassed and I was overwhelmed at the Senior Bowl. But if you talk to people in the NFL, they think I did fine. I think I held my own. You don't know what to believe."

Bartell grew up in Detroit, where his parents and sister still live, and focused on basketball more than football until his junior year of high school. He left Central Michigan, he says, because he went through five position coaches in 2 1/2 years at the school and he felt he wasn't getting any better. He sensed after his junior season at Howard that he had a legitimate chance to be an NFL player. Again, he was right. The coming days and weeks will determine where he will be in the rookie pecking order when he arrives at his new team's training camp in July.

FanfromAnnapolis wrote:We could use a bit more depth at the cornerback position, but this article has him going as high as the second round. . .I'm guessing that getting him as an UFA is an unrealistic idea at this point. The question would be, how high of a pick do we use to get him---4th round?

FanfromAnnapolis wrote:We could use a bit more depth at the cornerback position, but this article has him going as high as the second round. . .I'm guessing that getting him as an UFA is an unrealistic idea at this point. The question would be, how high of a pick do we use to get him---4th round?

Howard University cornerback Ronald Bartell was timed unofficially by former Cowboys executive Gil Brandt, who now works for the league, at 4.43 and 4.37 seconds in his two attempts at the 40-yard dash during the just-completed NFL scouting combine in Indianapolis. Bartell is one of the larger cornerbacks available in the draft, and those times should bolster his hopes of being selected in the second round in April.

A Second Chance At a First Impression
Howard's Bartell Looking to Move Up
By Mark Maske
Washington Post Staff Writer
Wednesday, March 23, 2005; Page D01


Scouts, coaches and front office executives from NFL teams spend every March watching the private workouts of draft prospects on college campuses nationwide in preparation for the late-April draft. Until now, a stop at Howard University has not been a must. "Usually, it's like six teams, max, at one of these," Edward Hill, the school's sports information director for the past 19 years, said yesterday.

Dozens of talent evaluators will be there this afternoon to scout cornerback Ronald Bartell. He has hopes of being drafted high in the second round, and if he impresses, perhaps he could be selected earlier. Thirty-one of the 32 NFL clubs -- all but the Detroit Lions, Bartell's hometown team -- have informed his agents they will have representatives in attendance. A Black Entertainment Television camera crew also is scheduled to be on hand.

Bartell will be evaluated, in part, by game tapes of Howard from the past two seasons, and of Central Michigan University for the two seasons he played there. But his performance today in drills highlighted by a 40-yard dash will also be critical. An eye-catching sprint time will move Bartell up many clubs' draft boards, and that's why he has spent the past 3 1/2 months at a Tempe, Ariz., training facility that specializes in readying NFL hopefuls for such pre-draft tests.

"You're pretty much preparing for a track meet," Bartell said in Tempe last week, sitting in the sun-drenched lobby of Athletes' Performance, a glistening, 4-year-old facility around the corner from Arizona State University's Sun Devil Stadium. Bartell has been working out at Athletes' Performance twice per day, six days a week since early December.

Training players for college all-star games, the NFL scouting combine and their pro-day workouts has become a lucrative industry within the last half-dozen years. Veteran NFL agent Leigh Steinberg recalled this week receiving a call from the father of Miami Dolphins defensive end Jason Taylor when Taylor was preparing for the draft eight years ago. The Taylors were considering Steinberg as an agent but wanted to know where he sent his draft-eligible clients to train.

"I said, 'What?' " Steinberg said. "I said, 'Mr. Taylor, I represented the first pick in the draft six times in seven years, and all those players trained themselves.' He said another agency had a training facility and was paying for it, and if I couldn't match that, they'd have to go with them. I said, 'Sorry, but I can't match it.' . . . I would say it developed that year, and it was like an arms race from there. Every agent felt he had to develop some sort of training regimen to stay in the client-recruiting game."

The Price to Compete


Steinberg estimated he will spend about $19,000 per client this year putting players through a training routine near his Newport Beach, Calif., offices. It's not just workouts. It's readying players for the Wonderlic intelligence test they take at the combine, and for their interviews with teams. Players are put up in hotel rooms and given rental cars. Since an agent works on a commission capped at 3 percent of a player's contract by the NFL Players Association, the agent must decide whether a player will be drafted high enough to warrant such expenditures.

"It's an expensive process," Steinberg said. "I'm sure there are some [agents] who do just front the cost and then charge it back. We do not charge our players for it, ever. . . . The training of players has dramatically changed the economics of the representation business."

It has become the cost of doing business, and virtually all top players now expect to be placed in such training programs by their agents. Percy Knox, the director of athlete management at Athletes' Performance, said his facility charges $10,000 per player for up to 12 weeks. That doesn't include meals, hotel rooms or transportation. "It can get expensive," said Bartell's agent, Jeff Griffin. "But it's worth it."

Griffin and his partner in San Antonio-based Momentum Sports Management, Jack Scharf, are one of the eight sets of agents who send their clients to Athletes' Performance. The facility had to turn away some interested players this year, capping its combine-preparation program at 30 players. Five players who trained there last year were selected in the first round of the 2004 draft, including Detroit Lions wide receiver Roy Williams and Atlanta Falcons cornerback DeAngelo Hall, and the program's operators expect to top that number this year.

According to Knox, nine staff members -- three performance coaches, three assistant coaches, a physical therapist, a nutritionist and a chef -- work with the players. Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays are devoted to developing upper-body strength and linear speed. Tuesdays, Thursdays and Saturdays are spent on lower-body strength and multi-directional speed. Thirty minutes each day are devoted to a specific individual issue -- in Bartell's case, flexibility -- and the athletes' bodies are "regenerated" three times per week with techniques such as aqua therapy and massage.

A Head Start


Bartell arrived in Tempe on Dec. 6, flying directly from D.C., after arranging to take his final exams at Howard early. He had nearly a month of general conditioning, while players at larger programs were preparing for bowl games, before the combine-preparation program formally began on Jan. 3. He left for the Senior Bowl in Mobile, Ala., in late January and for last month's combine, then returned after each.

"When we first started, Ronnie might have looked a little raw," said Luke Richesson, a strength specialist at Athletes' Performance. "But he closed the gap."

When Bartell arrived, he could lift 225 pounds 18 times in the strength test used at the combine, and he could run the 40-yard dash in 4.4 seconds. While at Athletes' Performance, he said, he improved those marks to 25 lifts and a 4.27 second 40. At the combine, where the scrutiny and schedule are intense, Bartell performed 21 reps in the strength test and ran a best official 40-yard dash time of 4.37 seconds. He was happy with that performance under the circumstances, he said. Griffin said he is pleased his client has run a good 40 time for the scouts. Both know a faster sprint today could propel Bartell to greater draft heights.

"You could probably break half of the combine prep down to that one skill," Steinberg said, referring to the 40-yard dash. "I think clearly there's a major competition that goes on between the various facilities and trainers based on the results of the combine and the pro days. They tout and brag about the results."

Entering the draft-evaluation process, NFL people annually scoff about what happens at the combine and on pro days. "This is the President's physical fitness test out here," New York Jets Coach Herman Edwards said at the combine. "I don't get all hung up on it."

But invariably, players gain and lose draft status based on what happens in the workouts. In Bartell's case, the effect could be even more pronounced because he didn't play at a major college program. "At best, this piece of the puzzle should be 20 percent," Falcons General Manager Rich McKay said at the combine. "Now, if you're dealing with a player from a smaller college who hasn't faced great competition, it might be a bigger piece."

Said Charley Casserly, the Houston Texans' GM: "Ninety percent of the player's grade is determined in the fall, by how he plays. What you're doing in the spring is trying to separate players. . . . The way you try to separate them is the workout. . . . The players don't go from the first round to the seventh round. But they can change by about a round."

RONALD BARTELL
Cornerback
Howard
Senior
6'2 | 205 | 4.40
HOME TOWN: Detroit, MI
HIGH SCHOOL: Renaissance

QUICK STRENGTHS: size, speed, upside potential, athleticism
QUICK WEAKNESSES: run support, aggressiveness
NFL COMPARISONS: Tall, athletic DB who could be a great one with some technical work, much like Dallas' Pete Hunter.

BIO: A three sport star (football, basketball, track) in high school, Bartell began his career at Central Michigan. He redshirted one year and then came in and started some games at both free and strong safety for the Chippewas as a freshman and sophomore. However, the uncertainty of CMU and head coach Mike DeBord's future caused Bartell to transfer to Howard. He became the starter at CB and earned All conference honors as a junior and as a senior.

ANALYSIS: Bartell has excellent measureables and the athletic ability to be a fantastic player at the NFL level. However, he does have some technical issues to work on before he can begin to realize his potential. He's a very tall, long legged corner. He has a bit of a lanky build and could stand to add more bulk and strength. Bartell is a very fluid athlete who has smooth change of direction skills. He has good straight line speed and can turn and run with receivers. He tends to side shuffle more than backpedal and sometimes will turn and run too early. Bartell is also used to playing man coverage without any help. He likes playing up on the line of scrimmage and does a good job of getting his hands on the receiver but will be more effective with this as he gets stronger. When the ball is the air, Bartell has the height and leaping ability to make plays. On occasion he will lose the ball in the air, but he has decent hands and will make the picks when they are there. There are times when Bartell seems a bit lackadasical and he has given up some big plays as a result. In the run game, Bartell has shown that he is a good form tackler who tackles low. However, he doesn't have great recognition and doesn't always come up aggressively. He has had some trouble shedding blocks from strong receivers. Bartell has also played some free safety in his career and his versatility is definitely an asset.

OVERALL: Bartell has a ton of potential and he is being given the chance to prove he belongs with the big boys. He certainly has the size and speed and his ability to play every spot in the secondary will allow him to find a home in the NFL. Bartell is a potential first day selection, 3rd/4th Round.

oafusp wrote:BUMP...

All this talk about picking a CB 9th overall is bugging me.

The Skins should target this kid in the 3rd round. And use their first 2 picks on more pressing needs.

Walt Harris is better than some of you think.