How Bears LB Ruben Hyppolite II went from no combine invite to fourth-round draft pick

Chicago Bears general manager Ryan Poles cracked a smile from the NFL Draft room. He had just made the team’s fourth-round selection and had a question for his colleagues.

“They gonna have a highlight?” he said on “1920 Football Drive,” the team’s in-house production. “They gonna be ready for this one? I love when they’re not ready for it.”

The networks were ready. When the Bears chose linebacker Ruben Hyppolite II, ESPN’s Field Yates said, “It looks like he has rocket launchers attached to his feet.”

The fans, however, weren’t ready. Many in the media weren’t, either. In Dane Brugler’s draft guide, “The Beast,” Hyppolite didn’t have a scouting report. He was ranked 35th among linebackers and projected as an undrafted free agent.

Hyppolite wasn’t invited to the NFL combine. He went to one all-star game: the Hula Bowl. He was a productive player at Maryland and a team captain, but he didn’t boast ideal length. He wasn’t a household name. In the media, he seemed primed to be a rookie free agent.

Until he ran his 40.

Christina Phillips has been an NFL agent for 20 years, often working with linebackers. She watched Hyppolite’s tape and saw the speed. She saw how smooth he was — his hips, his footwork. The weight — 240 pounds — would work just fine.

In the winter, though, not enough NFL teams were seeing it. The combine invited 329 prospects to Indianapolis based on feedback from the clubs on draftable players. Hyppolite wasn’t on the list.

Phillips told him to call NFS (National Football Scouting, Inc.) to find out why his name was omitted. The first time he called, they told him to call back in a week. They’d have another wave of invites going out.

“When I called the second time, they said, ‘Nah, you’ll run at your pro day,’” Hyppolite told The Athletic in a conversation during rookie minicamp. “I wasn’t upset. I was a little aggravated. But I didn’t go in the tank. I said, ‘It’s time for me to get out the mud a little bit. And that’s what I did.’”

Phillips knew what her client had to do.

“The way to get the needle to move in the league during the draft process is to run fast,” she said.

If he could hit an eye-popping time in his 40-yard dash at Maryland’s pro day, scheduled a month after the combine, she could then send teams back to the film.

Growing up in South Florida, Hyppolite said he was always around fast people. He ran track in middle school and began his football career as a running back. He knew he could run.

When he got to high school, though, he switched to defense.

“I didn’t want to get hit,” he said. “I wanted to hit people. I find more joy in that.”

Former Olympic sprinter Ato Boldon attended the combine years ago and watched prospects sprint, running for a higher draft pick, 40 yards that could sometimes mean millions of dollars.

When he saw football players try to run as fast as they could in a straight line, Boldon thought, “Oh, no. That’s terrible.”

For 16 years, Boldon has trained football players for the combine at Test Academy in South Florida. He tries not to get too excited about prospects early in the process. Hyppolite tested that philosophy.

“It was very hard for me to conceal what I thought Ruben could be,” said Boldon, an analyst for NBC’s coverage of track and field. “The first time I saw him run, I thought, ‘Shoot, he’s that fast, and there’s a lot of things I can help him with.’ From early in the program, I knew exactly what I had and was pretty sure he knew what he was capable of, too.”

Without the combine, Hyppolite had no measureables for teams. He didn’t get to interview with them, either. In late March, with less than a month to go until the draft, he had 40 yards to prove himself. All eyes would be on that sprint.

“Pressure’s a privilege,” Hyppolite said. “Going into it, if you saw me at the pro day, I heard nothing, saw nothing. I had tunnel vision. Couldn’t really explain the headspace I was in because that’s the mode I get into when it’s time to perform.”

In his 16 years of training draft prospects for the 40-yard dash, Boldon had never attended a pro day — until he went to College Park, Md., to watch Hyppolite.

Boldon admittedly didn’t love the run. He thought Hyppolite could’ve been even faster.

“But the building erupted,” he said.

Hyppolite didn’t slow down until he got to about 60 yards. He knew. “As soon as I ran that first 40, I was like, yeah, I’m in the door,” he said.

Maryland’s football account posted that he ran it in 4.39 seconds. In The Athletic’s draft prospect database compiled by Brugler, Hyppolite is credited with a 4.42.

Even the 4.42 would’ve tied for the fifth-fastest 40-yard dash for a linebacker at the combine dating back to 2006. It would’ve been the fastest for a linebacker at this year’s combine and a tenth of a second faster than first-round pick Jihaad Campbell.

Sixteen years before Hyppolite’s 40-yard dash, when his track experience and natural speed put him on the NFL’s radar, Boldon had advised a group in Miramar on the Ansin Sports Center, a new complex that would include a track. On the track’s dedication day, Boldon ran a ceremonial lap as part of the torch relay.

Boldon’s group would head to that track once a week to run. When the training concluded, Hyppolite had something to show his speed coach. It was a photo of Hyppolite as a child, running on the track that Boldon helped put together.

“It blew my mind,” Boldon said. “This is a full-circle moment. … When he showed me that picture of him training on the same track he was training on now to get ready in the NFL, it reminded me of our commitment to the kids around here.”

Suddenly, teams had to go back to Hyppolite’s tape. And without getting to talk to him at the combine, they needed to learn more about Hyppolite the person and how he could handle the classroom part of football.

A handful of teams scheduled visits before the pro day, but once someone of Hyppolite’s size runs as fast as he does — paired with his college production — more work needs to be done.

That meant 15 visits to team facilities — more than two dozen flights in two weeks. Each visit is a job interview. Phillips would check in with Hyppolite when he was at the airport. They’d prepare together for the next visit: coaches, schemes, etc.

“Waking up at 6 a.m., going through all the meetings, fly out that evening, land somewhere late just to wake up at 6 again, back and forth, add the local (pro) days in there,” he said. “It took a little toll on my body, but I had to get it done.”

The speed is Hyppolite’s on-field strength, but while the visits would test his mental stamina, it was also in his wheelhouse.

The visit to Halas Hall won the Bears over.

“He’s very mature, and he’s very business-oriented,” defensive coordinator Dennis Allen said. “He’s got his life together off the field, which is going to allow him to be able to focus on the field with the football. There’s not going to be a lot of outside distractions with this guy, and I think that’s a positive. I think he’s going to be a guy that’s going to learn how to be a pro really quickly because of that maturity level.”

On “1920 Football Drive,” Bears assistant director of college scouting Francis St. Paul said that “everybody loved him” when Hyppolite came to Lake Forest.

“You put a star by him,” St. Paul said. “(Allen) always speaks about speed, and we got it. … This guy is a great human being, great football character. He loves it. He’s a leader. To get that as well as a good football player, you can’t ask for anything more.”

With the 132nd pick in the draft, the Bears chose Hyppolite.

“A guy that is extremely smart, tough — and one thing, talking with (Allen), is we want to continue to add our team speed, and he can fly,” Poles said that night. “He’s a low 4.4 player that’s very active, but again, we like the combination of speed and the intelligence.”

As Poles chewed his gum and grinned from the draft room, exuding confidence over finding a player who wasn’t on the public radar, Bears fans scrambled to figure out who Hyppolite was.

They came here to read Brugler’s rankings. They headed to other draft websites. Immediately, the Bears were labeled as “reaching” for Hyppolite. How could a player who went to the Hula Bowl and didn’t get invited to the combine go in Round 4?

It serves as a reminder that 32 teams have 32 different sets of draft rankings, all of which differ from the draft boards in the media.

Hyppolite’s high school coach would send him links “where I was ranked, like, 600 or something.” He tried to ignore the prognosticators but said, “That caught my attention.”

“I used it as fuel,” he said. “It wasn’t my motivation. A little sprinkle of gasoline in the fire, I would say. I took that and ran with it. I wasn’t looking to prove anyone wrong; I wanted to prove myself right.”

With the offseason training program done, it doesn’t matter what one draft guru thought of Hyppolite in February. Now he’s a Bear, and he has a chance to come out of training camp as the third linebacker alongside T.J. Edwards and Tremaine Edmunds in the base defense.

Head coaches generally abhor singling out players in the spring, but Ben Johnson didn’t seem to mind. At the end of minicamp, he named three players, one of whom was Hyppolite.

“I thought the player we probably saw the most improvement from when he stepped in to now was Ruben Hyppolite,” he said. “I thought he’s done a nice job learning. He’s swimming a little bit, but he’s taking it seriously. (Linebackers) coach Richard Smith has done a fantastic job with him over the course of the last few weeks.”

In the short term, Hyppolite figures to be a key player on Richard Hightower’s special-teams unit. He will compete to be the No. 3 linebacker. In the long term, if everything works out, Hyppolite could take over as a starter down the line.

During rookie minicamp, Hyppolite reflected on his path — one all-star game, the combine rejection, the pro day, the 15 team visits — that led him to standing in the media room at Halas Hall, addressing reporters as a Bears draft pick.

“All of that is just a culmination of me getting my opportunity now,” he said. “I definitely don’t take it for granted. I’m very grateful for everybody upstairs for believing in me and my ability. Now it’s time for me to put it together and just — I just love my story for anyone who’s out there who thinks that they need things like the combine, things like a Senior Bowl invite, who think that they need those things to get drafted. You