The Season Ticket

Combine Chaos

KYE JOHNSON
Assistant Sports Editor

Issue date: 3/1/07 Section: Sports

Imagine this: You are a college football player trying to get into the National Football League (NFL). Now you’re that same college football player at the NFL draft combine where you’ll be put to the test for every imaginable physical skill one could possess. Hundreds of scouts, coaches, team owners,
trainers and agents will all be there to see how well you test.
Why? So everyone in the world knows where you deserve to be selected in the NFL draft come April 28.

Some of the categories they test you on at the combine are just absurd too. Sure, they’ll see how fast you are, find out how much you can bench press and determine what kind of agility you have. But then they’ll see how big your hands are and how well you can talk to a reporter, and measure how tall you are to within a one-hundredth of an inch. Believe me, anything you could possibly imagine being tested for you’ll find it at the NFL combine. Everything except how good of a football player you
actually are, of course.

Here’s what I mean. The NFL combine will tell you Jerry Rice is
too slow, Drew Brees and Emmitt Smith are too small and that Vince Young isn’t smart enough to be an NFL quarterback.

Well apparently Rice, Smith and Brees felt they weren’t gifted enough, and that Vince Young guy? Turns out he was at least smart enough to win the Rookie of the Year Award.

What else does the combine do? Well it will tell you that Ricky Williams is going to be the next Walter Payton. It will tell you that Brian Bosworth is the best linebacker to ever grace the face of this earth.

It will tell you Akili Smith is going to lead the Cincinnati Bengals to Super Bowl after Super Bowl and it will also tell you that it’s a better idea to choose Mario Williams with that first overall pick than Reggie Bush. And we all know how great of an idea that was.

Now yes, the combine can in fact help a lot of players but it doesn’t really help the team. You can find some diamond in the rough that runs a great 40-yard dash and has a huge vertical leap and then wonder why his name wasn’t all over the place in college. It’s really a simple concept - the guy isn’t a great football player, as opposed to being a great physical specimen.

The combine will also tell you Cincinnati Bengal wide-receiver T.J. Housmanzadeh is a last-round caliber pick but that ex-Viking, ex-Seahawk, current Green Bay Packer and DWI felon Koren Robinson is a top-ten pick.

My main point is that the scouts, the coaches and everyone else put way too much emphasis on the way people test or how fast they run at the combine. The NFL is so obsessed with seeing who’s “stock” is rising and falling due to their combine performance that often great players are completely overshadowed and lost in the mix of it all.

For Boise State fans the name Mike Hass should be vaguely familiar. He was that receiver from Oregon State who torched the Broncos for 293 yards and three touchdowns a few years back. That same guy was also Oregon State’s all-time leading receiver and the Fred Biletnikoff Award winner (Best Wide-Receiver in College Football) his senior year. He also set the Pac-10 record for most receiving yards in a game and the most in a season and ranks No. 8 in the conference all-time
in receptions.

How does a guy like that get drafted in the sixth round of the NFL draft? You guessed it. The combine said Hass was too slow and too short. Yet he proved time and time again how great a football player he is.

Sure, the NFL has many great physical specimens who can run fast and bench press an oak tree. But the NFL also has a lot of guys who aren’t great football players and end up flopping. The league is really missing out on a lot of good players for no reason other than the hype around the combine.

Will that hype to perform in the combine ever die down? I don’t know. I hope so - and I have a feeling the Houston Texans do too.

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