Objectivity Is the Whole Job
Notes from 4th Down Focus, Episode 101, with Grant McKinniss of Combine Kicking.
Every specialist evaluation comes down to one question: compared to what?
For most of the history of this position, the answer was somebody's eyes. A coach watched a kid kick for twenty minutes and formed an opinion. That opinion travelled - to a staff, to a camp invite, to a scholarship or the absence of one. It was often right. It was also unfalsifiable, which is a problem when a kid's next four years hang on it.
That's the thread running through our conversation with Grant McKinniss on Episode 101. Grant punted at Kentucky and Missouri, worked as a special teams analyst at Eastern Michigan, and now runs Combine Kicking out of Indianapolis. He came up through the subjective era and now builds his evaluations on measurement. He is worth listening to on what changed and why it matters.
What "objective" actually means here
It doesn't mean a number replaces a coach. It means the coach's judgment gets something stable to stand on.
When a specialist steps on a TrackMan-equipped field, the ball's behavior stops being a matter of opinion. Launch angle, ball speed, hang time, rotation, distance - those are recorded, and they read the same in Indianapolis as they do in Ormond Beach. What a coach brings is the interpretation: what the numbers mean, which ones matter for this athlete at this stage, and what to do about them on Monday.
The data doesn't make the evaluation. It makes the evaluation checkable.
Why it matters most for the kids nobody has heard of
Here is the part that gets missed.
Subjective evaluation quietly rewards access. The athlete who trains near a major metro, whose family can fund the camp circuit, who happens to kick in front of the right person on the right afternoon - he gets seen. The athlete in a small town three hours from anywhere, with the same leg, does not. Under a system of impressions, being good and being known are two different achievements, and only one of them is distributed fairly.
Measurement collapses that gap. A verified number travels without its owner. A staff evaluating a kid they've never watched in person can look at his data next to everybody else's and know what they're looking at. That is a fundamentally different market than the one most of us grew up in.
It's the reason Kickometry is built on measurement rather than around it, and the reason TheTour runs on TrackMan across more than a dozen states rather than in one place. The point is not the technology. The point is that a kid in a small town gets evaluated on the same terms as a kid with a plane ticket.
The uncomfortable part
Objectivity cuts both ways, and anybody selling it as pure good news is selling.
Numbers end arguments the athlete may have been winning. A specialist who has been told for three years that he has a college leg can put up data that says otherwise, and no amount of belief changes the reading. That conversation is hard, and it is also the most useful one he will have - because it happens with two seasons left to do something about it, instead of at a signing period when there is nothing left to do.
The same applies to coaches, us included. Measurement makes our work falsifiable. If we say a change will add hang time and the hang time doesn't move, the data says so. That's the cost of working this way, and it's the right cost. A method that can't be wrong can't be trusted either.
What to take from it if you're an athlete
- Know your numbers before somebody else tells you what they are. Walking into an evaluation blind is how athletes get surprised.
- Track the spread, not the best one. Your longest kick is a party trick. Your consistency is the job.
- Ask any coach recruiting you what they measure. If the answer is vague, the evaluation is vague.
- Treat a bad reading as information, not a verdict. It's only a verdict if you get it too late to use.
Listen to the episode
Episode 101 covers Grant's playing career, the founding of Combine Kicking, how TrackMan changed specialist evaluation, and the work TheTour and the Kick It Forward Foundation are doing to get objective evaluation in front of athletes who'd otherwise never get it.
Get measured
Every 4DU session runs on TrackMan, whatever the format and whatever it costs. If you want to know where you actually stand, that's the starting point.