Brian Gutekunst says the Packers don’t use RAS, but it aligns well with how the Packers pick.
On the Monday before the 2025 NFL Draft, Brian Gutekunst spoke to the media. His interview was as wide-ranging as you’d expect, but within that wide range, Gutekunst got specific about one thing: Relative Athletic Score.
Asked if he incorporates the popular metric into his pre-draft process at all, Gutekunst gave a fairly firm no.
“We don’t use RAS score at all,” Gutekunst said. “We don’t have anything like that. We do have some analytic scores that our analytic people do on their own that measures athletic traits and other things.”
In short, we don’t use it at all, but we do use things like it.
Fair enough. Gutekunst would probably never come right out and say if the Packers did use RAS (if they did), and I’m not sure they should use it directly, anyway. It has its limitations. But factoring in athleticism is worthwhile (football is a game for big athletes, after all), so we should at least ask if what the Packers are doing is meaningfully different from just using RAS.
And as to that question, I think the answer is also no. You can probably approximate whatever athleticism metrics the Packers are using just by using RAS yourself.
I wrote about Gutekunst’s RAS-oriented draft trends in 2020, and the data hasn’t changed much since then. In his now eight years as the Packers’ general manager, Gutekunst’s draft classes have had an average RAS of 8.0 or higher (the threshold for “elite” athleticism) five times. Two additional times, his classes have posted an average RAS of 7.9 or higher. He’s never put together a class with an average RAS below 7.6.
The 2025 class, in particular, showcases how RAS is a good indicator of how the Packers will pick. Matthew Golden and Savion Williams didn’t complete enough tests to produce a RAS number, but Anthony Belton was an 8.14, Barryn Sorrell and Collin Oliver were a 9.31 and a 9.74, respectively, and Warren Brinson was a 9.1. Even the non-elite testers, Micah Robinson and John Williams, put up a 6.41 and 7.55. Focusing on athleticism alone would have given you a good idea of what the Packers were going to do, especially if you focused on edge rushers after the Packers didn’t take one in the first three rounds.
I’m not here to say whether or not drafting elite athletes is a good idea or to weigh in on Gutekunst’s overall draft strategy, though targeting elite athletes seems like a pretty decent way to find prospects with the highest of ceilings. But it seems clear that even if the Packers aren’t using RAS, it’s a fairly decent approximation for whatever they are using. If you’re looking for guidelines to identify the sort of players the Packers might be interested in taking, RAS and their pre-draft visits would be great places to start.