Doyel: NFL Combine being destroyed by those who love it most: NFL executives and media
INDIANAPOLIS – Someday we’ll look back at the NFL Scouting Combine and ask: Can you believe they actually did that?
It’s a demeaning process that takes a chunk out of the athletes who attend by exposing them to an insulting battery of mental testing, absurd and often racist questions from NFL talent evaluators, and disrespectful gotcha questions from reporters.
Oh, like I don’t know plenty about those last five words? Stay tuned for that, later in this column.
Also coming down the road, though a bit farther away, is the day where we – athletes, teams, reporters, you – won’t have to endure the NFL Scouting Combine anymore. More and more players are opting out of the combine’s physical and cognitive testing, and once that momentum gets going, it’s just a matter of time. This week in Indianapolis we’ve seen the top three quarterback prospects for the 2024 NFL Draft decline to throw the football in front of scouts, and we’ve seen the top two receivers decline to catch it.
And we’ve seen the projected No. 1 overall pick, Caleb Williams of Southern California, get asked this question by a hysterical media member who wanted his 10 minutes of fame:
Are you afraid to compete?
Seriously, the guy shouted that. Before realizing his mistake and deleting the post after 5 million views, the reporter posted the exchange on Twitter, because Twitter has become good for one thing anymore: Giving the mean or stupid – or both – a place to show off just how mean or stupid they are. Too many people then see it and recognize something in themselves, and decide to amplify the mean or stupid messages. It’s almost sweet, isn’t it? They’ve finally found a community where they belong.
Morons.
We’ve also seen this week a much larger number of players decline – here I prefer the word refuse – to take part in cognitive testing for all kinds of reasons, mainly this:
NFL teams can’t be trusted to protect the information. And reporters can’t be trusted to do the right thing.
It takes a village to run the NFL Scouting Combine as well as we’ve run it here in Indianapolis since 1987, but it takes just a few awful human beings to destroy it. Hurry up, awful people, and give this thing, this NFL Scouting Combine, the quick and painful death it deserves.
CJ Stroud embarrassed, Caleb Williams insulted
This is about what happened last year to C.J. Stroud. It’s about what happened this week to Caleb Williams. It’s about what happens every year to a handful of prospects who show up at the NFL Scouting Combine because, well, that’s the way it’s always been – and if that isn’t a sentence that captures what’s wrong this world, I don’t know what is.
The way it’s always been? Once upon a time, because that’s the way it had always been, football players didn’t get water at practice because dehydrating them in 100-degree temperatures made them tougher. They returned to the field with brain damage because they “just got dinged up.” They attended the combine and took the cognitive tests, where they were promised their results would stay private, because that’s the way it’s always been.
A year ago, Ohio State’s Stroud entered the 2023 NFL Scouting Combine in Indianapolis as the No. 2 QB prospect behind Alabama’s Bryce Young, though it was close, very close. Stroud, Young and the rest of the top quarterback prospects at the combine took something called the S2 Cognition test. It’s not an IQ test, like the Wonderlic was said to be, but something even more basic: How fast does the brain compute external stimuli?
Young took the test and aced it, scoring a 98 out of a possible 100.
Stroud took the test and bombed it, scoring an 18.
Allegedly.
Doyel in 2023: Anonymous sources are lying about CJ Stroud as draft stock falls
Those scores weren’t announced, but leaked to The Athletic. Afterward, the co-founder of the S2 Cognition test went on the Pat McAfee Show to say the following:
"The day that those leaks happened, my phone was blowing up from general managers and our attorney," Brandon Ally told McAfee. “Two of those scores are not accurate. They're not accurate at all.
"One of the particular athletes on that list I know had a difficult time making his way to the (combine). Things were delayed. He was in high demand. He was hungry, tired, it was 11 p.m., didn't want to do it. He was frustrated. We administered the test because we're asked to.”
We administered the test because we’re asked to.
And players took it for the same reason. How did that work out for Stroud?
The off-field fallout was cruel. Thing is, when Stroud spoke at the 2023 combine – and the proof is in the story I wrote that day – he was the most impressive quarterback I heard. (Anthony Richardson was next.) And whatever Stroud scored on the S2 Cognition test, he produced a historic season for a rookie quarterback and won the NFL Offensive Rookie of the Year award.
Pretty sure Bryce Young didn’t enjoy such a season. It’s almost like the Cognition Test is overrated, if not mostly useless.
Doyel at 2023 Combine: Bryce Young, CJ Stroud, Anthony Richardson meet media. Winner?
King of gotcha questions? Me! Sigh.
OK, you want some confessions? Here you go. Nobody in the history of sports reporting has asked more ridiculous, gotcha questions than me. Some have gone viral, like me and LeBron James at the 2011 NBA Finals, or me and Jim Boeheim at the 2013 Final Four.
In my defense I was writing stories those nights, on tight deadlines, based on exactly those questions. My LeBron question was horribly worded, but the Boeheim question was merely horrible timing. Dozens of reporters raised our hands in his news conference after Syracuse’s loss to Michigan, hoping to be one of the handful of people chosen to ask something. When the moderator called on me first, I remember thinking:
Oh no. This is going to go viral.
And it did. I’ve asked some weird questions around here, too. Fans of the Colts, you’ve heard them. Same with IU fans. At Purdue they’ve called me “Hallway Gregg” because I was always following coach Matt Painter or his players away from the podium to get them alone. My questions tend to come out in a, shall we say, raw way that go over much better in private. It’s who I am. Not sorry.
There’s a difference between being clumsy and cruel, though, and the question to Caleb Williams – Are you afraid to compete? Really? – was cruel. But we get those all the time at the combine, along with cruel stories from anonymous sources ripping Cam Newton or Lamar Jackson. Reporters write those hatchet jobs because they don’t recognize, or care about, the difference between information and misinformation.
That’s the NFL Scouting Combine: A sea of misinformation splashing around, getting everyone wet.
What happened last year to C.J. Stroud? The combine is full of similar stories. Wonderlic scores were leaked almost every year, which is how we learned Mike Mamula scored a 49 in 1995, and Frank Gore scored a fraction of that in 2005. One of them has a case for a bust at the Pro Football Hall of Fame. The other is one of the biggest busts in NFL Draft history.
Cognitive tests are imperfect at best, and if they’re going to be leaked, they’re disgusting. This year two of the largest sports agencies, Athletes First and Rosenhaus Sports, instructed their clients not to take cognitive tests. Next year more agencies will follow suit. And more, and more, until only the players most desperate to make an impression are taking the test.
Same is happening on the physical testing front, with the top three prospects at quarterback (Williams, LSU’s Jayden Daniels, North Carolina’s Drake Maye) and top two at receiver (Ohio State’s Marvin Harrison Jr., LSU’s Malik Nabers) skipping it.
When all five of those guys are taken in the first round – possibly in the top 10, all of them – what will that say about the necessity of physical testing at the combine? When a handful of clients from Athletes First and Rosenhaus Sports go in the first round as well, what will that say about cognitive testing? Will they stage a combine in the year 2027 if only the Day 3 draft prospects are participating in anything but medical tests and team interviews?
That wouldn’t exactly make for compelling television, and a combine without a TV contract is like that tree falling in the empty forest:
Who cares.
Find IndyStar columnist Gregg Doyel on Twitter at @GreggDoyelStar or at www.facebook.com/greggdoyelstar.
This article originally appeared on Indianapolis Star: NFL Scouting Combine big on insults, as quarterback Caleb Williams saw
