SI

Saints Think Gadget Player Taysom Hill Could Squat 800 Pounds

Sport scientist Matt Rhea spoke with Mike Triplett and had a laundry list of quantifiable metrics to express how ridiculous Hill is.

Josh Wilson

Taysom Hill plays a number of roles for the New Orleans Saints
Taysom Hill plays a number of roles for the New Orleans Saints / Mark J. Rebilas-USA TODAY Sports
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Taysom Hill does not fit nicely in any of the traditional football position groupings. The utilityman, gadget player, or as he's now being referred to, Avenger-esque athlete, is multifaceted and ridiculously athletic.

Fans have known this for some time, seeing him light up fantasy scoreboards as a tight end or a quarterback or a fullback. He's returned kicks at various points, too. But the New Orleans Saints organization has literal quantification for how athletic he is.

Matt Rhea, director of sports science for New Orleans, told Mike Triplett (who has coined the Avenger comparison) for an expose on Hill for NewOrleans.football that Hill currently back-squats 685 pounds, with the only limit on him going higher being Rhea himself. Tech the Saints have suggests Hill could squat 750 pounds, and Rhea thinks Hill can get to what sounds like superhuman strength.

“I told him once he retires, we’ll go for 800. And I think he’ll get there," Rhea told Triplett.

Rhea went on to explain that of 10 key metrics the Saints track, Hill is top 10 in nine of them, with the next-best player in the building top-10 in just three categories. Hill tops the leaderboard in lower body strength, lower body power, and sprint power. He maxed out the tests New Orleans has available for sprint power.

He's certainly unique.

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Josh Wilson

JOSH WILSON

Josh Wilson is the news director of the Breaking and Trending News team at Sports Illustrated. Before joining SI in 2024, he worked for FanSided in a variety of roles, most recently as senior managing editor of the brand’s flagship site. He has also served as a general manager of Sportscasting, the sports arm of a start-up sports media company, where he oversaw the site’s editorial and business strategy. Wilson has a bachelor’s degree in mass communications from SUNY Cortland and a master’s in accountancy from the Gies College of Business at the University of Illinois. He loves a good nonfiction book and enjoys learning and practicing Polish. Wilson lives in Chicago but was raised in upstate New York. He spent most of his life in the Northeast and briefly lived in Poland, where he ate an unhealthy amount of pastries for six months.

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