With the NFL Draft starting on Thursday, we figured the importance of playing multiple sports in high school was worth revisiting, which brings me to the following tweet.
As the white board illustration shows, according to the leg work done by the good folks at TrackingFootball.com, of the 510 picks in the last two NFL Drafts, an impressive 85% of them were multi-sport athletes in high school.
Of those 510 draft picks, over half of them were track and field athletes in high school, and just a hair under half of them were basketball players. Interestingly, only 15% of them specialized in football, 7% played baseball, and 3% wrestled during their high school career.
Back in March we did a piece on how nearly 95% of NFL quarterbacks (122 of 128) played at least two sports in high school, and nearly 70% of those guys played three or more. Also in that article - 85% of the 2014 recruiting class for Alabama, Ohio State, and Notre Dame were multi-sport participants.
The above tweet is further research for high school coaches to have handy for the players who come to them and say they want to specialize in football (or really any sport). It couldn't be any more clear; Specializing in one sport doesn't pay off. Be a multi-sport athlete.