What do 40-yard dashes, bench presses, Wonderlic Tests and agility drills have in common? They are all part of the NFL Combine used to evaluate college football players making the jump to the NFL.
We have all had the experience of taking a test, looking it over, and then second guessing a couple of answers. It's frustrating. Nothing is worse than finding out you changed a right answer to a wrong answer, but in the classroom it's usually just going to cost you a couple of points. It's annoying, but you move on.
Now imagine that test answer isn't just worth a couple points.
Let's say you have $32 million riding on the question. Get it right and win the money. Get it wrong and lose the money. How many times would you second-guess yourself?
Now let's say you have four months to figure out the answer. I'd like to see the stress test results from that guy.
This is exactly what NFL owners do to themselves.
That $32 million is how much money last year's No. 1 overall draft pick, JaMarcus Russell, received in guaranteed money before ever taking an NFL snap.
A player's performance at the Combine can make or break his draft stock. College athletes, such as Russell, going into the draft have three or four years of games on tape free for any owner to look at.
Sure a 40-yard dash time can illustrate how fast a player is, how explosive he is-but in my 21 years of watching NFL games, I have never seen a running back get the ball without pads on and sprint forty yards in a straight line. It is the game film that shows how a player can translate skills on paper into a performance.
If I'm going to answer one question for $32 million, I'll look it up in a book, not run an experiment.
The NFL draft is still a month and a half away. However, for those four and a half months, coaches and scouts evaluate every player coming out and still mess it up.
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Owners think the best way to minimize mistakes is to treat incoming rookies like cows going to the slaughter. They poke and prod and measure every physical attribute possible and still end up drafting an Akili Smith.
But to paraphrase Yogi Berra, half the game is 90 percent mental, and nothing in the Combine can measure the intangibles.
After three or four years of college football, a player can watch his stock drop because he had a bad three days of practice.
Last year, the top two quarterbacks coming out of the draft were Russell and Brady Quinn.
Russell was selected ahead of Quinn not because he outperformed the Notre Dame quarterback in the Sugar Bowl, but because he outperformed him in the meaningless Combine.
For all of its hit and miss qualities, the NFL treats the art of drafting like it's a science. Forty-yard dash times, plus bench press weight, plus Wonderlic test, times vertical leap height, equals draft order?
It doesn't necessarily work that way, and the NFL should stop wasting our time with Combines and months of speculation and move the draft to late February.
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