The Combine

"Worst four days of my."
     -Vikings linebacker Chad Greenway

That was Greenway's response when he was asked about his NFL Scouting Combine experience from 2006. A lot has changed since then. A lot of the event is televised now. The number of requests for media passes to the event has exploded in the past decade. It's a big show now. Bigger every year. It's still as bad. if not worse, for the players. Greenway said that by the time he was finally on the field for the drills he was drained. The interviews, the poking, the inspecting, the inane questions. It's three full days of interrogations, both physical and mental, before a player even steps onto the field for drills. 

The medical portion of the combine is often the most important part of it. The teams have to know if a player is healthy. If injuries, old and recent, are healed. Vikings safety Harrison Smith recently spoke of his 2012 combine experience.

"You have one doctor checking out your collarbone and shoulders and a doctor from another team checking out your knees and your ankles. Then they switch. It was something that I was told they were going to do, but hearing about it and going through it are two completely different things. It was really strange."

Whenever I hear about this sort of physical inspection I think of cattle, or any livestock, at an auction. The players become a side of beef. An object rather than a person. Smith adds that there's some solace in that every player is going through it with him. 

The Scouting Combine is a funny thing. It's important. Especially the medical checks despite how it's done and how invasive it is. The weigh-ins. The interviews. Those are important. Most of the rest of the rest becomes more important than it should be. Whenever anyone thinks of the Scouting Combine they think of the on-field drills. The 40, the bench, the vertical jump, the position drills, etc. Every player trains for these drills specifically. Many players even drop out of school to do so. Football is now their job. Even for the players that have only a slight chance of even being drafted. These drills have become the NFL Scouting Combine. These drills are the reason that many fans tune into NFL Network's coverage of the Scouting Combine. These drills sometimes even convince an NFL decision-maker to draft a particular player far earlier than their actual football talent warrants. These damn drills often become more important than a player's 3-4 years of college football. It's funny. It's also a little sad. A football talent evaluator forgetting about football talent because a player runs fast or jumps high after training for a month or more to do just that. That's sad.  

The NFL Scouting Combine is a very unique event. Harrison Smith calls it strange. It's probably the strangest job interview of which I'm aware. A job interview that will, in may ways, continue for the next two months. But it is unique. And it is an event. I think that it's become a big event for the fans, and as a result a big event for the NFL, for what it symbolizes. It's become the start of the next NFL season. The previous season has just ended and the fans are already hungry for the next one. There is no offseason in the NFL anymore. The Scouting Combine means that the draft is upon us even though it's still two months away. It takes at least two months to discuss all of the possibilities that the draft holds. Two months. The Scouting Combine. Pro Days. It all kicks off in Indianapolis today.