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Combine effort Scouting collective is about performance, not playing
Updated: Friday February 23, 2001 4:48 PM
One of the great rites of late winter in American sport is currently taking place in Indianapolis. Careers are at stake, millions of dollars are won and lost each day, household names are created. I'm talking, of course, about the NFL Scouting Combine, during which football players who are living in the limbo between playing for free on Saturdays and for pay on Sundays are treated like race horses at a breeding sale and reduced to a set of numbers on a chart. Boiled down to its essence, the Combine is this: An opportunity for NFL executives and coaches to get the best college players together in one location and test them until the players feel like the original Mercury astronauts. They are interviewed, paper-tested and worked out for three days, essentially so that pro teams can add to the already considerable "books" they have on draftable players. NFL people like the Combine because it is a controlled environment and they can compare year-to-year workout numbers with some degree of reliability. They also just plain like control. That's football. The Combine has a little to do with playing football and a lot to do with performance. By performance, I mean poise during interviews, big numbers on paper tests and excellence on the turf of the RCA Dome. NFL teams have already scouted most of the players at the Combine. Area scouts, scouting supervisors and player personnel directors have already seen every snap of their college careers. They know who can play and who can't. Yet the Combine can somehow veto all of this evidence. Witness Chris Redman. Coming out of Louisville last year, Redman was fighting with Marshall's Chad Pennington to be the top quarterback picked in the draft. Redman had been a very good player at Louisville and NFL talent evaluators liked him a lot. Then Redman ran a plodding 5.32 in the 40 at the Combine. He subsequently dropped into the third round, and was taken by the Baltimore Ravens as the 75th overall selection. Those 5.32 seconds cost Redman hundreds of thousands of dollars. But here's the catch: the Ravens love him. I talked with a Baltimore scout at the Hula Bowl last month and he says the team is convinced Redman is the real deal. Plus -- my words, not his -- Redman was a serious bargain. But here's where I'm confused. Smart guys run NFL teams. They can go to games and watch videotape and figure out who are the good players. Yet they let themselves get swayed by one lousy 40 or a bad shuttle run. Redman was a good player before the Combine and he'll probably be a good player afterward. New Mexico linebacker Brian Urlacher, on the other hand, moved up big-time -- he was selected in the first round, ninth overall by the Bears -- with a huge Combine workout and made himself all the money that Redman lost. In this way, the Combine isn't about finding good players. Good players will always rise to the surface. It's about determining who gets the money early and who gets it late. This year, for an upcoming story in Sports Illustrated, I'm following a draft-eligible guy from his bowl game through the draft. I'm not going to name the guy here because I promised him -- and a whole lot of other people -- that I wouldn't write about him until after the draft. Just know that he was a very productive college player who still needs a big Combine performance to make himself wealthy. Everybody knows this dude can play football, but he has to come to Indy and run fast, jump high and fill in little circles really well to convince the NFL one last time. Otherwise, he gets drafted low and has to prove himself in training camp as a mid-round pick. Which he will. And for a lot less money. Sports Illustrated senior writer Tim Layden covers college football for the magazine and is a regular contributor to CNNSI.com. Click here to send him a comment.
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