A week or two before the actual NFL Combine, at Pete Bommarito’s site near Miami, trainers put Bhayshul Tuten and others through a mock event.
The former Virginia Tech running back went through all the events he’d have to do in Indianapolis — the vertical jump, broad jump, 5-10-5, three-cone, position drills and, at the forefront of everyone’s mind, the 40-yard dash.
The goal was simple: Give players a real-time sense of what they’d be doing in front of NFL general managers, coaches and scouts from all 32 teams at Lucas Oil Stadium during the last week of February and start of March.
“I felt like I was at my peak and my prime at that moment,” Tuten said. “There was nothing but confidence because I knew what my range was.”
What he didn’t account for when he took the field on March 1 was those two little black lines.
You can see them on the broadcast, marking the starting line. Tuten had practiced his walk-up steps, figuring out where his feet should be placed, but not with two black marks present. Both feet have to be behind the lines, forcing the Hokies tailback, with his size 11 shoes, to modify his stance from what he practiced.
He still flew on his first attempt, racing across the finish line in 4.38 seconds, the first back to go sub-4.4 on the day.
It was fast, but not as fast as he knew he could go. Tuten called up his trainer to regroup, forging a plan of attack for the two-line situation.
Tuten told him bluntly what was on his mind about his first run: “That wasn’t it."
Poked and prodded
It’s been fashionable over time to bash the combine as NFL excess, a quest to turn the sport into 12 months of content by pumping up “The Underwear Olympics” as a huge determiner of where a player will go in the upcoming draft.After all, these players have had years of tape they’ve put out showing their actual skills on a football field with pads on, not just running and jumping in spandex in an antiseptic environment.
Still, the annual gathering in Indianapolis has gained an outsized importance in the offseason, in large part because everybody in football is in attendance.
While the on-field portion gets all the attention and TV time, much of what occurs at the combine takes place in the labyrinth of hallways at Lucas Oil Stadium and the adjoining Indiana Convention Center in downtown Indianapolis.
Meetings, meetings and more meetings preface the workouts, some more tedious than others. Tuten arrived on Sunday and had a pretty relaxed Monday, getting the lay of the land. Those first few days are fairly chill, with players having informal get-togethers with teams in a free-for-all. He sat in the middle of a big room and if teams wanted to chat with him (and all 32 did), they’d pull him aside to a different room to meet coaches, talk shop and go through his background.
The media session Friday had a similar vibe, with players staged at different podiums around a room and various reporters coming up and asking questions — nothing too crazy.
Medicals later in the week were a bit more laborious. Every team wants to know what they might be drafting, so players are poked and prodded to the Nth degree. Players meet with five or six teams at once, with a central NFL doctor examining the player and answering questions from the teams' medical personnel. For Tuten, they were informed about his leg injuries from last fall.
His prognosis more or less read like this: “This past season, he had an MCL sprain, an ankle sprain. The MCL’s fine, he missed no games. Ankle sprain, he missed one game. Due to my examination, I found that there’s no pain, full mobility, nothing nagging or anything like that. He’s all fine, 100 percent, on both the knee and ankle.”
If teams want to get hands-on to check on a player’s health, they can. Some require X-rays or MRIs to ease their minds. Tuten had three X-rays on his knee that checked out fine.
All in all, he got off pretty easy.
“I know some people were there for eight, nine hours based off of their history,” Tuten said. “It’s pretty tough, so I’m glad I lucked out.”
‘The fans are going nuts right now’
After all the preamble, the running backs had their moment in the sun with on-field workouts Saturday. They rose early, had breakfast and went over to the stadium to hit the field.His group did the jumping events first, with Tuten’s training showing out right away. He set a personal record in the vertical jump by a half inch, leaping 40.5 inches to lead the running backs. He finished second among the backs in the broad jump, putting up a 10-10, three inches farther than what he’d done weeks earlier.
“I was locked in,” Tuten said.
The 40 was next, but not for a while. There’s time between the events and players go alphabetically (he was No. 30), so Tuten chilled for a bit, calling his boys back in Jersey to just have some fun and loose conversations.
“Some people, they go over and start listening to music to get all tensed and energetic for an hour and a half,” Tuten said. “You get worn out and tired. So I always like to be on the looser end and more open. So I called the homeboys and we all talked in a group FaceTime and stuff like that, joked around.”
Tuten got locked in about 20 minutes before he ran, putting in headphones, shuffling his playlist and working on his starts.
After his first run of 4.38 seconds, he called his trainer Bommarito to come up with a plan of attack for those black lines at the start. After some strategizing and tips, Tuten altered his stance, practicing it off to the side a few times before being satisfied with his setup.
He wasn’t nervous; that only happens when you’re not prepared. He was confident based on the months of work for this moment.
“I was calm, level-headed, just focusing on all the things I needed to do, like the details I have,” he said. “Just rehearsing those in my head, walking up to the line, taking that pause, getting tunnel vision, staring down the track. And then you get into your mark and it’s pretty simple from there. … I was 100 percent confident that I was going to run pretty fast. I just had to stay relaxed and stay fluid and just run like I was trained to do.”
He was champing at the bit a little too much, though, not holding his starting position long enough on his first try at a second attempt. You have to be locked into your stance for a beat. An official blew a whistle to stop Tuten after a few steps and make him start over.
After getting back into the starting block, Tuten shot out of the gate on his second run.
“I exploded out like I wanted to, I think better than the first time,” he said. “Carried the drive phase, then the second phase was pretty good. Just stayed consistent the whole time. Stayed relaxed. … It was pretty amazing.”
He crossed the finish line in 4.32 seconds, drawing cheers from the typically docile crowd in attendance watching the event. Tuten yelled out, “Let’s go!” as he darted down the field.
“I hit the target area that I wanted to be in. It was kind of what that was,” he said. “All the work and struggle that you put in for the past two months paid off when I saw that number go up.”
The run caught the attention of the NFL Network’s Rich Eisen, who interrupted his light banter in the booth with, of all people, comedian David Spade to highlight Tuten’s sprint.
“Hold it a second,” he cut in. “The fans are going nuts right now.”
https://twitter.com/NFL/status/1895909388931776738
Tuten's time of 4.32 seconds wasn’t just the fastest of the running backs for the day, it was tied for the fourth fastest time by a running back since 2003, behind only East Carolina’s Chris Johnson (4.24 in 2008), Kent State’s Dri Archer (4.26 in 2014) and Georgia’s Keith Marshall (4.31 in 2016). It matched Texas A&M burner De’Von Achane’s mark in 2023.
As Tuten walked back to the other side of the field, he heard it. Though there were fans from all walks in attendance, a familiar sound started faintly and grew in volume: “Let’s go … Hokies.”
“For them to do the Hokies chant while I was running back was kind of tough,” he said. “There weren’t that many Hokies in there, but just to hear all on one accord, it was kind of crazy. It was just kind of surreal."
Somewhere in Lucas Oil Stadium, the phone of Tuten’s agent, Andy Ross, started blowing up. More than half the league reached out after the running back’s blazing 40, with seven GMs personally texting. A few trading card companies circled back to Ross wanting to talk.
The Tuten Train had reached full speed.
On everyone’s radar
Tuten and the running backs concluded their day with position drills, high-stepping over mats and through pads and doing pass-catching drills.His final report couldn’t have been much better. Tuten was tops among running backs in the 40, 10-yard split (1.49 seconds) and vertical jump and finished second in the broad jump. Chris Trapasso of NFL.com listed him among the 10 players who had the best combines, putting Tuten in the second-round range with his projection.
Tuten would catch up on all of that later, though. In the immediate aftermath, he went up to the suite Bommarito had rented out for all his clients, one with food, TVs, couches and massage tables. He crashed for a little bit, relaxing and watching some of the other workouts on TV in between congratulations.
He met up with Ross, who pulled out the custom-made, upside-down Cheetah hats they had designed beforehand, so confident were they that Tuten was going to run a blazing-fast time.
“We knew from the jump that I was going to run fast,” Tuten said. “I’m a fast guy. So we just had to train and prepare for it and go out there and perform.
“The biggest thing is compared to pro day, you’re doing it in front of millions of viewers instead of a couple hundred people. You go out on the biggest stage and do it in front of a national TV audience and all 32 head coaches and scouts and head coaches. That’s why I like that I performed there.”
Ross told him about the interest Tuten had generated. Over the next few days, dozens of coaches and NFL personnel reached out. Tuten has three or four “Top-30 visits” — when teams can bring the player in for further interviews and physicals, suggesting serious interest — and a half dozen more private workouts, with Zooms and interviews to be arranged. There were so many teams Ross mentioned to him that Tuten couldn’t remember them all, though he knows Dallas and Houston are on the list.
“These next few months are going to be pretty busy,” Tuten said. “We’re just at the beginning, but I’m expecting to roll with it.”
https://twitter.com/NFL/status/1895915153990042076
The days immediately after the combine were for decompressing. He flew back to Miami that Sunday, taking Monday for one last treatment before finishing up his time at Bommarito’s. Tuten flew back home after that, spending a few days with friends and family before making the six-hour drive back to Blacksburg this past weekend.
He’ll train in town for Virginia Tech’s pro day on March 26, with plans on filling in the blanks from his combine performance by doing the bench press, shuttle, three-cone and position work.
That’s about adding to his résumé, though. He did the hard part — getting people to notice. Tuten’s performance earned him an NFL Network spot in the week after.
https://twitter.com/nflnetwork/status/1897811093751578913
If he wasn’t on everyone’s radar before, he is now.
“I think that a lot of people are paying attention now,” Tuten said. “A lot of teams know my name now, know who I am based on that workout. And I came in with that mindset to make a name for myself on that level.
“I like to call it the underdog mentality. I wasn’t getting that many calls and recognition with big-time interviews. But after the combine, I think a lot of people were on notice now of who I am and my name. And I’m loving it.”