INDIANAPOLIS — This week’s NFL Scouting Combine has long been a pro football industry convention: a moment for agents, scouts, team executives and league officials to gather over steak dinners and late-night drinking, all while incoming players perform skills tests and are medically and psychologically evaluated.
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But this insular football confab, telecast now by NFL Network for the 18th year, is increasingly a big business off the field. There were 628 media members credentialed in 2010. It’s almost 1,000 more this year. Just as the insatiable demand for NFL information has driven the wild popularity of the late April NFL Draft, watching the next incoming crop of rookies run, jump, throw and lift for days on end is its own business marketing opportunity.
Look no further than NOBULL, the upstart Boston-based training apparel and footwear company with roots in the CrossFitness world. This is NOBULL’s first year as the official apparel and training sponsor of the NFL Scouting Combine, and the company is spending big dollars, viewing the event as a major platform to promote its name and nip at the heels of giants like Nike and Under Armour.
“Thinking about the NFL, it’s one of their three or four biggest events of the year — the Super Bowl, the draft and the combine,” said Todd Meleney, NOBULL’s chief marketing officer, who was the 225-employee company’s first hire in 2013. “We feel like the combine has as much if not more potential to reach the same scale as the draft and some of these other events throughout the year. Because it’s really compelling content, and where else can you go see the fastest athletes in the world be tested in their 40s time or max out their bench press? To us, that’s as exciting as them walking across the stage. And we feel like fans would love that.”
NOBULL’s name is on athletes, in press conference backdrops, on the combine logo, and when clips are used from this week during draft coverage, the brand will get another dose of exposure.
Unlike previous apparel sponsors New Era and Under Armour, NOBULL has invested in a more significant presence on-site in Indianapolis, with 25,000 square feet dedicated to a locker room, training venue and recovery lounge for the roughly 325 prospects who will course through Indy this week.
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Located in the midwestern city’s convention center, which is attached to Lucas Oil Stadium where the drills are held, prospects are checked in at a VIP-like reception desk and then pace through a darkened 70-foot-long tunnel. They emerge into a spacious locker room with 40 wood-paneled lockers bearing their names. The arrivals are obviously staggered to accommodate the hundreds of players, with name plates sliding in and out atop the lockers.
In each locker is a stash of NOBULL merchandise, from compression shirts, trainers and running shoes, to a weightlifting belt. Each combine participant receives a kit with 46 items that NOBULL valued, precisely, at $2,783.14. Other than cleats, which NOBULL does not make, this is the apparel each combine athlete wears while participating. So assuming each of the 325 attendees gets a kit, that’s nearly a $1 million expenditure right there, which doesn’t include gear given to everybody who is on the field during the combine and team front-office officials.
DJ Johnson, a linebacker from Oregon, posted on Instagram stories, “SHOUT OUT TO @NOBULL FOR GETTING US RIGHT,” the words surrounded by flames over a picture of the gear laid out.
In the past, apparel companies at the combine, whether official or not, rented out suites at area hotels where prospects were brought in by agents for a swag bag. But those familiar with the gifts said NOBULL’s quantity outpaces the rest.
“They have fully invested,” said Bryan McCall, executive director of performance at Sports Academy, a training site located at The Star in Frisco, Texas, and who accompanied 13 prospects to this year’s combine. “They are offering a total kit top, bottom, bags, weightlifting belt. Legit!”
The workout venue features a 45-yard-long football field, 20 aerobic machines, six loaded squat racks and 100 pieces of equipment ranging from free weights to foam rollers. The recovery center has massage tables and 100 recovery devices including massage guns and compression boots.
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“We’ve never really had the ability to have the accommodations like this, where they’re taking care of all of our manual recovery needs, our strength needs and also our movement needs,” said McCall, who started coming to the combine in 2011. “It looks authentic,” he said of the NOBULL space, “so this is what trainers like myself, we’re used to seeing facilities like this.”
@nobull warm up area at the NFL Combine. This is the first time anyone has provided something like this to the players. MUCH NEEDED!! pic.twitter.com/kPvJq0ejmC
— Brent Callaway (@BrentCallaway) February 28, 2023
In the past, if an athlete wanted to train before stepping onto the Lucas Oil turf, wind sprints in the hall or a hotel gym were options.
NOBULL had ties to the NFL before the combine. A few years ago, Meleney said NFL players started organically contacting the brand for gear (there is only one retail location, in Miami). As a Boston-area company, it signed Patriots quarterback Mac Jones as an endorser. The company also has among the combine prospects: highly-touted Kentucky quarterback Will Levis and Kansas State running back Deuce Vaughn.
“He is 5-foot-5 and an incredible underdog story,” Meleney said of Vaughn, comparing him to NOBULL’s own David status in the apparel and footwear business. “And he can back squat, let’s fact check this, but it’s like 400 pounds for 12 reps.”
Bryce Young, the Alabama quarterback who could be the first pick in the draft, had a Name, Image and Likeness deal with NOBULL while in college, but is not under contract now.
But the biggest tie to the NFL is that the league late last year acquired a small stake in NOBULL, giving it more incentive to boost the combine sponsor. Meleney will not directly comment on the investment, which owners approved in December. But he makes abundantly clear that NOBULL, which also sponsors the PGA Tour, plans to use its new NFL perch to expand to other sports. And perhaps one day gets its brand onto an NFL field, arguably the most coveted commercial space there is.
“Nothing’s out of the question,” Meleney said. “We’re excited to grow with the NFL and see where it goes.”
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As for the name of the company, it’s shorthand for what first comes to mind: No bulls—. In the training world, that means no excuses. And NOBULL is counting on by aligning with the NFL and the combine, it is no BS that one day it is a household name.
(Top photo of Alabama linebacker Will Anderson wearing NOBULL attire as he takes questions in front of the company’s logo at the combine: Trevor Ruszkowski / USA Today)