Size matters in the NFL. Just…maybe not to the extent the NFL Draft process makes us believe.

The draft is big business, both for NFL teams as they look to gather the next crop of cheap, available talent, but also to the media as draft information and prognostication is quickly becoming as important to cover as other sports leagues in terms of traffic and revenue.

So, we’ve gotten to a point where an inch of height here or a eighth of an inch of hand size there becomes echo chambered into oblivion and countless mountains have been made of so many mole hills.

Case in point: We’ve heard, repeatedly through the draft process this year that Oregon quarterback Marcus Mariota’s slight frame is a concern for the ever-elusive anonymous scouts. Recently, a picture surfaced that led some to question Florida State quarterback Jameis Winston’s physical fitness.

In short: Mariota was too skinny and Winston was too fat.

Then they weighed in at the combine—Mariota at 6-foot-3, 222 pounds and Winston at 6-foot-4, 231.

First off, that’s nine pounds difference. While, admittedly, it is likely that Mariota added muscle for the event and Winston shed fat, it’s still nine pounds difference and was unlikely ever a wide enough margin for either to be “too” anything.

Perhaps more importantly, Mariota is roughly the same size as players like the New York Jets Geno Smith or Detroit Lions Matthew Stafford when they entered the NFL, while Winston is actually lighter than Andrew Luck for whom size was considered an ideal.

This kind of context-free thinking leads to things like this pair of tweets from NFL personnel guru Gil Brandt, collected here by a Rams message board.

Two players with identical hand sizes—one viewed as a negative, the other viewed as a positive (or, at least allowable). Brandt has forgotten more about scouting than I will ever know, but this is how the NFL collective thinks about size: It matters, except when it doesn’t. We’ll come back to these later…

The opposite extreme here, of course, is those that say it doesn’t matter at all.

Many people, myself included, spent a lot of digital ink telling everyone that Russell Wilson’s height would (or at least could) keep him from being an elite NFL quarterback. Two Super Bowl appearances later and it’s clear that many of us were wrong. Well, in a way…

You see, it isn’t that Wilson’s height doesn’t matter. No, it does and it’s silly to say that it doesn’t. Still, even at the high level of play he showcases on a weekly basis, there are times when it’s clear that he doesn’t have the throwing lanes he might like and has to move around in the pocket to see down the field. This is something that doesn’t happen as often if you’re a few inches taller.

Where it doesn’t matter, though, is when one considers the total package. Wilson is a fantastic quarterback, and there are things he can do with mobility, intelligence, throwing motion, etc that mitigate his lack of height.

This means the question is never: is a player too anything. Rather, it should be asked if the prospect’s physical deficiency in whatever area is a big enough detriment to be overcome.

This is how NFL scouts think, and thoughts like that add context to Brandt’s tweets referenced above. Go back and re-read those thoughts on hand size with the context not of “too small” or “big enough” but rather view hand size as a tiny puzzle piece in the overall picture of a prospect’s picture.

It’s still rather silly because they have the same hand size, but when you’re looking at a quarterback like Bridgewater who was vying for the top spot and another in Garoppolo who was a small school guy no one really knew anything about outside of some promising all-star game practice reps and grainy footage against subpar competition.

You’re not looking at hand size to rule a guy out completely, but you are seeing if their might be issues that need to be compensated for.

The nonsensical nature of the conversation doesn’t come from the statements themselves—noticing a guy’s borderline hand size, or Bridgewater’s “skinny knees”—it devolves into idiocy when the statements are repeated ad nauseum without context or devoid of their meaning.

Like so many debates that have be beaten to death over the years by people arguing only from the hot-take extremes, this one is really only solved with a bit of nuance.

Size matters in the NFL. There are ideal heights and weights for positions that teams look at and that have changed over the years along with the game. It is true that a guy with prototypical size is likely to be more successful than those without, and it is also true that plenty of guys (even some of the best) at every position break that mold in very positive ways.

Size matters as part of the overall picture, but it does not entirely define a player.

Let’s stop pretending otherwise.