At the risk of hating, I cannot stand the SPARQ scores because Nike tries to make it proprietary by having the goofy Powerball Throw instead of using bench press and then taking the calculator away from public consumption.
Reverse engineering tells you that the equation is a product of five multiplicative factors, but the weighting is difficult to ascertain. The reason is the true freaks of nature break the scale and it's difficult to determine exactly what weight they're giving to a player going from a 4.3 40 to 4.25 etc. We know the marginal gains for improvement grow as the result improves, but not to what extent. The flip side is that the return is much smaller at the lower end of the scale (the reasoning behind this is to prevent one bad score from ruining the entire output).
It's all unnecessary and overly complicated so that ESPN can claim access to an unnecessary set of metrics.
There's a reasonable conversion chart for the toss to bench press that makes this more intuitive. Just tell me the metrics that correlate to success at the college level for that individual position and then test for those areas and I'll get what I need much better than SPARQ.
I agree with you that's why I only look at the Weight, Height, 40, Shuttle, and Vertical, sometimes PB. The Sparq is a non-factor to me because I don't really understand how they come up with that number lol.
