NFL Combine: When seeing isn't always believing

NFL executives should be wary of Combine warriors

Thursday, February 22, 2007
BY PAUL NEEDELL
Star-Ledger Staff

League executives and coaches reverentially called it "The Royal Box."

From their perch inside the RCA Dome in Indianapolis, former Giants/Patriots/Jets/Cowboys coach Bill Parcells and Raiders owner Al Davis would watch draft prospects put on a beauty contest at the annual NFL Scouting Combine.

Now enjoying his recent retirement, Parcells yesterday offered a word of advice as he drove from his home in Saratoga to visit his sister-in-law in New Jersey.

"At the end of the day," Parcells said, "we lose sight of, 'How well does this guy play football?'"

It's so easy to do. While more than 300 college players will be weighed and measured, timed in the 40-yard dash and analyzed by all sorts of psychological and intelligence-measuring means today through Tuesday and beyond, the NFL Draft on April 28-29 remains among the most inexact sciences.

History is littered with the Mike Mamulas of the world, workout warriors whose draft stock soared after stunning NFL "experts" by testing off the charts. Rest assured, as much as teams try to avoid it, mistakes will be made by those who fall in love with measurables over whether a guy can play the game.

"That's really what you're trying to find out," Parcells said. "Those timing drills and those jumping drills don't tell you how he plays."

Besides the physical drills players are put through inside the dome, there are the medical exams team doctors conduct with finely tuned stethoscopes. That's an awful lot of poking and prodding.

"I was kidding last year that there were more doctors at the Combine than there were prospects," Parcells said. "I mean, each team had four or five doctors. They bring 300 players in there but the draft board I'd operate off of only had 120 players on it."

Oh, and coaches and personnel men get a chance to meet individually with the players, who go from one team's booth to another. Like a huge cattle call.

Ed McGuire, the Chargers' executive vice president of football operations, has grown skeptical about the value of those, too, noting, "Unfortunately, most of these guys now are so well prepared that the answers are orchestrated."

Teams know they must have their antennae up to detect what's real and what's not. Players not only attend pre-combine training schools to improve their 40 time but are also coached on how to act during their job interviews with the clubs.

"Those (interviews) are good because you can get a feel for them personally," Parcells said. "You can ask difficult questions to see how they respond."

And yet. ...

"But these kids now are so well trained on the Combine procedure," Parcells said, "you can't tell if you're talking to the kid or somebody who prepared him."

Even though Parcells likes to think of himself as a good judge of character, he employed a former FBI agent for the Jets to help interrogate prospects. No stone left unturned.

"We always had him talk to the players, especially those who might be problematic," Parcells said. "He had a pretty good way of figuring out if a kid was lying."

The testing will continue well beyond this extended weekend. Many players won't even expose themselves to on-field workouts until next month, preferring the friendly confines of their college campus to the RCA Dome.

"It's the product of agents trying to draw attention to themselves," Parcells said. "I hate to say it, but they have their own agenda. They have their prospects, and it brings attention to the agent."

All attention on the next few days, though, will be on the players. Whether the focus remains on how they played the game in college or how well they test in Indianapolis remains to be seen.

"The major question is, 'How did the guy play?'" Parcells said. "If you can't answer that question, those stopwatches aren't going to answer it for you."