Anyone that has spent a lot of time in the gym eventually will find themself watching a sporting event and think “I wonder what Player X squats”. I’ve done it before, I’ve gotten into debates with my friends over it. Its all projecting, but its fun to talk about.

In comes my “If They Powerlifted” analysis’s then for the fun of having a debate. Today I’m starting with a player from my favorite football team, The New York Giants.

For those of you who don’t know Dexter Lawrence I’ll give a bit of a background. Dexter (or “Sexy Dexy) is a defensive tackle for The New York Giants who attended college at Clemson University. He was a first round pick in 2019 (17 overall) and was named to the NFL All Pro team in 2022. Dexter is a large man, even for NFL standards, standing at just about 6’4 1/2” and playing at a weight of 342lbs.

Dexter isn’t just big, he’s also an extremely impressive athlete for his size, hence being named an NFL All Pro. As you can see from his RAS (Relative athletic score) Dexter only performed the bench press and ran the 40 at the NFL combine, but put up impressive scores for each:

A few things should stick out about this chart:

• In a game where guys run 4.2X 5.05 doesn’t seem impressive, but those guys aren’t 342lbs. This is an extremely fast time for a guy his size and shows a high amount of explosion
• His 34.5″ long arms and 10.5″ hands are long and big even for NFL standards. These would also give him a huge advantage in the deadlift
• Usually you’d say the long arms would kill his bench, but 36 reps at 225 says otherwise. This would translate to a bench of just about 500lbs

Digging through the internet its hard to find a lot of information on players workouts, but fortunately Dexter was pegged as a physical freak early on and tidbits of his gym performance have been leaked throughout his college career:

• Bruce Feldman’s freak list had him with a 460 max bench press and 345 power clean
• A 2017 article had him squatting 550 at 19 years old (now 25)
• A 2019 article listing him squatting 600 (Quoted by Adam Smotherman)
• Multiple articles have him running the 40 faster than his combine performance of 5.05 breaking the 4.95 mark and posting a 1.70 10 yard split

Right now we’re looking at a verified 460 bench, 600 squat and unknown deadlift performed while he was in college. Not crazy numbers but we need to factor in that NFL players don’t go as crazy pushing their weightroom numbers up as many think. In short, each position has a range they like to see players in and once they start hitting their numbers, the training changes to help their speed, agility and long term health. Dexter likely hit that point very early in his college career.

So how do we figure out exactly what his numbers would be if he powerlifted? Good question, there isn’t really an exact way to do it, but we can make some guesses and assumptions.

First things first, if he were to dedicate himself to powerlifting there would be bumps in his numbers based on two things:

• Removing the large cardiovascular demand NFL training puts on his body
• Dedicating to 3 lifts, rather than a sport that requires 100 different skills

Heck, we can even throw the ability to run a peaking phase which would net 5% on each lift on its own. So the big question is, what do I think his gains would look like if he concentrated?

For starters, I think his bench is closer to its limit than his lower body lifts. My reasoning for this is simple, football is an extremely lower body intensive sport, because of this its much harder to push your squats than it is your bench. They also don’t test squats at the NFL combine, so players never go out of their way to specifically work that lift for testing. They do for bench.

Because of this I think it would be fair to take what is max reps nets as a 1 rep max (495) and add maybe 5-7% to it. So that would be a 525 bench press. Not a crazy number for a man his size, but remember, he has 34.5″ arms.

The squat and deadlift are much harder to project but we do have some things to work off of and, while we don’t have measurements, you can take a look at his build and a couple things stand out:

Take a look at this picture in the middle of his “Sexy Dexy” sack dance celebration. A couple of things stick out to me. First is the fact that he seems to have relatively short legs and femurs in relation to his height. The second is that he seems comfortable in wider stances which suggest that his hip sockets and glute strength favor this stance. Both of these things are favorable to a big squat and sumo deadlift.

Going back to squats, we’re going to use 600lbs as his starting number and ask where he can go from there. I would expect at least 10% of a bump from concentrating on the lifts, plus another 5-10% for being able to peak, so a total of 15-20% which would put him in the 700 range. Honestly, I think this would be his floor. But to be conservative, we’ll use a 20% bump and put him at 720.

Right now we’re sitting at 525 for bench press and 720 for squat (1245 so far), but the deadlift is where it gets interesting. I went through and looked at videos of some of the larger powerlifters and tried to find very long armed lifters who also had big bench presses and squats, then looked at their deadlifts.

Unfortunately, the only two lifters kept circling back to had crazy big deadlifts. They would be Dan Grigsby and Jamal Browner.

YES I’M PUTTING HIS DL CEILING UP THERE WITH THEIRS

Starting out, if we used the 720 squat number, it puts him very close to where Dan and Jamal are. Dan has registered 1000lb deadlifts in competitions where he squats under 700lbs, Jamal frequently posts high 700’s to low 800’s. While arm lengths aren’t listed for power lifters. All 3 men clearly have very long arms and short legs to pair with them. All 3 also have very good lower body flexibility and even though I’m not sure how much time Dexter Lawrence has spent sumo deadlifting, I don’t think he’d have an issue learning it.

The big question is will I put Dexter as a 1000lb deadlifter even though Dan and Jamal are his comps? My answer is no, its just too much weight to “project” a person to lift. I will however, say there’s a 200lb gap in between what I expect his bench and squat to be, and feel comfortable using the same gap between his squat and deadlift. So my final projections on his numbers would be:

• Bench – 525
• Squat – 720
• Deadlift- 920
• Total – 2165

I think I’m going to get 2 conflicting opinions on my summary. NFL fans are going to say “An NFL All Pro has elite genetics that far eclipse anyone in the powerlifting world” while competitive lifters will say “Guys like Dan and Jamal honed their crafts for years, its not fair to just project a guy to a 2100 and change total”.

I think both are valid arguments but I do lean towards the genetics side of the argument. When someone has the level of natural athletisicm Lawrence does, they aren’t steered towards powerlifting, they’re steered towards sports that pay just a little bit better, which is why NFL players are at a higher genetic level than even the best powerlifters.

Dexter Lawrence just signed a 90 million dollar contract extension by the way…

Leaving with this as my final thoughts. While 2100+ is a big total for a raw lifter, I think I was possibly conservative with it given his elite genetic traits, but it just isn’t fair to assume world records etc… for a person not participating in a sport.

But at the same time, watch this video of Lawrence against multiple time All Pro LG Quenton Nelson, who is 330lbs on his own, and let me know how strong you think Dex is…

/https://twitter.com/_RyanFowler_/status/1609641482742374409