Taysom Hill story

Taysom Hill is Paul Bunyan.

He’s Hercules. He’s an Avenger.

Except the difference with each of those fictional tall tales is that Hill’s legend actually has the science to back it up.

Saints director of sports science Matt Rhea had so much unique data to share about Hill’s exploits that when he started to mention him earlier this summer, he instead asked to schedule a longer block of time at a future date.

That future date wound up being Thursday, one day shy of Hill’s 34th birthday – an age that makes the versatile FB/RB/TE/QB/WR/special teamer even more of a ridiculous marvel.

“From my standpoint as a sport scientist and as a strength and conditioning coach, it's like you look for things that are just so unique that you're never gonna experience in your career, you haven't seen,” Rhea said. “I've worked with some pretty high level teams and athletes and I've never seen anything like this. So I doubt I'm ever gonna see it again.

“And there’s a lot of satisfaction that comes from just seeing a guy work that hard for that long.”

So where to begin?

Rhea already teased us earlier this summer with the fact that Hill set a new personal high by back-squatting 685 pounds. But Rhea said that number is actually unfair to Hill, since Rhea is the one who won’t let him go any heavier.

“So he keeps getting mad at me,” said Rhea, who said he is able to project a player’s maximum squat through the technology they use – and Hill’s is 750 pounds. “I told him once he retires, we’ll go for 800. And I think he’ll get there.”

Hill is listed at 6-foot-2, 221 pounds, but that weight has fluctuated based on what position he’s playing over the years. In recent years, they’ve settled on 230-235 as the ideal weight for everything he’s asked to do as a player who takes on heavy collisions but also surpasses 20 miles per hour when he breaks free in the open field as a ball carrier.

And that’s where Hill is most fascinating. He does a little of everything – but all of it at the highest level.

“There's 10 main metrics that we track in everybody. Some of it's during games, on-field stuff, some of it's in the weight room,” Rhea said. “He’s in the top 10 of nine of them. And the next player is top 10 in three of them.

“So he's literally great at just about everything. That's a very unique thing from a measurement standpoint to see elite data in pretty much everything we track. And the one that he's not top 10 in, he's top 20. So he's even really good at that.”

That one area where he’s not top 10 is maximum speed on the field – which Rhea said is usually topped by WRs or DBs that weigh 40 pounds less than Hill. But obviously speed is not a weakness for Hill, who has nearly 3,000 career yards from scrimmage and a combined 38 rushing and receiving TDs.

It gets better.

Hill ranks No. 1 on the Saints in three of those categories: lower body power, lower body strength and sprint power. And he’s No. 1 by a lot.

“Lower body power, he's No. 1 and he's 20% higher than No. 2. In lower body strength, he's No. 1 and he's probably 100 pounds in the squat higher than the next guy in line,” Rhea said. “And sprint power, we have that sprint machine and we basically attach a tether to them, and I can add weight and you just progress resistance until it slows them down enough that power drops.

“Now 1500 watts is a really good score. Most of our guys are 1500 to 2000. Taysom is 2800, and I ran out of resistance. So most guys are ending at about 30 kilos, which is 50, 60 pounds. I went up to 90 kilos with Taysom, and he's still improving. So I've literally run out of resistance to keep testing him. I don't even have machines that are good enough to test him.

“So in that sense, he really has the strength and power of our linemen and speed of our running backs and the acceleration of our receivers. He could perform at any of those positions, when it comes to our data. And then he's got the I.Q. of a quarterback. So it's really incredible.”

The other metrics the Saints track, according to Rhea, are game acceleration, broad jump power and a variety of weight-room categories like high pulls, split jumps, squat jumps and a squat-to-press exercise.

Alas, Hill only ranks third in acceleration, which measures the player’s first few steps. He loses out to two other Avengers in that category – RB Alvin Kamara and DE Chase Young.

“Alvin’s acceleration is the highest I’ve ever seen in football,” said Rhea, who said Kamara's acceleration is more than 11 meters per second – close to Olympic sprinters.

Young is about 9 meters per second. Hill’s peak was about 8.4 – and hasn’t really dipped over the age-defying years.

So what do you do with a player like that? Well, that’s the question the Saints have tried to perfect over the past eight years – confounding NFL analysts and even some of the team’s own fans in the process. Perhaps no NFL player has been accused of being used both too much and too little and being so overrated and underrated all at once.

But the truth is that the reason there are so few comps for what teams should do with a player like Hill is that there simply aren’t “players like Hill.”

And it obviously wasn’t just a Sean Payton thing since new offensive coordinator Klint Kubiak and his staff seem so fascinated by Hill’s potential that they appear poised to use him as much as ever in more ways than ever – adding a ton of fullback and tailback work into the mix. When you throw in this new offensive system’s heavy use of shifts and motions, we regularly see Hill shift from the backfield to tight end, and we’ve even seen him shift out wide among other wrinkles.

“Another credit to Taysom, he’s willing to do everything. And a lot of times, especially at this level, that spreads you pretty thin. And it makes his life much, much harder,” Rhea said. “And if he was just a running back or just a receiver, he would actually probably be viewed a little bit differently around the league. And so there's, I think, some sacrifice in that sense.

“But if you ask him, that's not a (concern). He loves it. He's having an absolute blast right now.”