Scouting Combine

Mike Mayock calls it the "underwear olympics." He just wants to differentiate it from the real football but it's pretty accurate. Most know it as the NFL Scouting Combine. Indianapolis hosts it and each year it seems to get bigger. The players started arriving Wednesday and it finishes up next Tuesday. Over seven days, 333 college football players go through four days of poking, prodding, testing, running, jumping, pressing and questioning.. It's the biggest job interview of their lives.

National Football Scouting president Jeff Foster is running his eighth scouting combine. He deals with everything from getting the players to Indianapolis, out of Indianapolis, and everything in between. It includes coordinating with local medical facilities. 350 MRIs were performed on 333 players last year. It's an incredible piece of scheduling and Foster and Indianapolis has it down to a science.

While NFL people rarely agree on anything they absolutely agree that the medical exams and the interviews are the most important parts of the combine. The fans see it differently but they rarely see football realistically. The fans love the running, the jumping, the numbers. That's why NFL Network televises the NFL Scouting Combine. I'm actually more interested in Manti Te'o's interview and Keenan Allen's knee than who runs the fastest 40. Mayock calls it the "underwear olympics" to lessen the importance that many put on it. It's not football. That's not to say that the on-field combine portion is pointless. It's just to say that it should always be a supplement to what the player has done on the football field for a handful of years.

A growing aspect of the combine that annoys many in the NFL is the decision by some players to skip the on-field workouts. It's mostly a few quarterbacks that pull this stunt. Supposedly they do so on the advice of their agents. These agents and their quarterback clients want to script the workouts, at familiar facilities, with familiar receivers at a later date of their choosing. They want to control the process. It's like going into a job interview and handing the interviewers a list of scripted questions. In the competitive world football choosing not to compete is pathetic. If I was an NFL decision maker, I'd look at a quarterback choosing not to throw the equivalent of throwing a bunch of passes straight into the Indianapolis turf.

The pace of the football offseason is nice. Two weeks after the Super Bowl there's a little hunger for some more football. The NFL Scouting Combine provides a little taste. If nothing else, it introduces to many of us the college football players that will be NFL players in a couple of months.