Last night, after suffering through probably the worst non-football season sports day in recent memory (USA hockey loss, Nuggets loss at Lakers, FSU men’s basketball loss to Clemson) and trying to sit through the never-ending pain of the Olympic closing ceremony, I flipped over to the NFL Combine on the NFL Network. As they showed running backs run their 40-yard dashes they scrolled the top performers from different positions across the various tests across the bottom. A couple names in the wide receiver group stuck out to me. Emmanuel Sanders from SMU was at or near the top in every category. As was Jacoby Ford. In fact here are write-ups on each from a combine review:
Emmanuel Sanders/SMU; terrific overall performance, ran great routes, showed a terrific burst, and had the ability to turn it on in a single step. Caught the ball well all day.
Jacoby Ford/Clemson; stood out in every aspect. Ran great routes, showed a terrific burst of speed, and caught everything thrown in his direction.
I don’t know anything about Sanders other than that he played in June Jones pass-happy system not known for producing NFL products (though now that I am a proud owner of SMU pony workout shorts after visiting the campus a couple weeks ago I should probably learn) so I can let Turner weigh in here, if he desires. I do watch my fair share of ACC games, however, and while Ford has always been a serious threat due to his speed and athleticism that is all he has remained – a threat.
It seems clear both players will jump up draft boards based on their performance this weekend, but should they? Should a great forty time and broad jump outweigh four years of game film? Ford was never dominant in college but his forty time will inevitably lead someone to draft him at least 2 rounds too early. My money is on Al Davis.
Anyway, all of this got me thinking about a post I wrote a couple years ago about the insanity of the combine and national signing day in college.
Going through Withdrawals
Now that even the Pro Bowl is slowly fading from our rearview mirror, the sad realization that football is only a hypothetical discussion is beginning to weigh heavily on me. Suddenly, anything that even allows one to imagine how games will look when played next fall becomes something to obsess over. Like the smell of a cinnamon candle when you are starving, any football like substance is enough to trigger an obsession with the sport.
Only because we as football fans have nothing to spend our hours mulling (unless we are willing to transition loyalties to lesser sports like the NBA or baseball), things begin to take on greater importance than they truly have.
For the NFL, we have the combine, a truly worthless exercise if one ever existed. How many more Combine Wonders do we have to listen to Mel Kiper extol only to watch them fade into oblivion the moment they put the pads back on? Just because someone can quickly run forty yards in a straight line in a t-shirt and shorts has little bearing on whether they can play in the NFL. Same goes with bench press or vertical leap. Remember Dan and Dave? They would have been awesome at the combine. Strong, fast, quick, explosive. But can you picture either of them being an NFL star? Me neither.
We have all seen the players that shoot up the draft board because of phenomenal combine performance (Mike Mamula being everyone’s favorite example) yet never really become stars (or even starters). Seems to me that if a player’s performance on the actual football field left him slotted low on the draft board, that is a better indicator of their future status than how they perform in a sterile environment for which they have trained specifically for months (with people like my former coach Tom Shaw). If someone is fast, strong or can jump really well, wouldn’t that be apparent in how they play in a game?
If there was some other football distraction, wouldn’t we probably ignore this glorified track meet/weightlifting competition? Distractions like…umm… the new and improved Pro Bowl!
At the college level we have National Signing Day. A day that has become so overblown and overhyped we have kids making up an entire recruiting process just so they can be one of the lucky few who get hold a press conference in their school auditorium and put on their chosen school’s ball cap.
I admit I have gotten sucked into the hype of signing day in the past. When Lorenzo Booker made his prime-time, SportsCenter-broadcast decision a few years ago, my wife and I were standing and silently muttering at the screen as if there were 30 seconds left in a tie game with FSU facing a 3rd and 14 from the opponent’s 41 yard line. After his speech about living out his boyhood dream and putting that FSU cap on his head we both cheered as if an FSU kicker had finally made a game winning field goal against Miami. I immediately called my friend Doug to discuss how we were sure to return to a national championship game with Booker coming in to play the Warrick Dunn role.
Well, Booker’s career came and went without a national championship. Heck, it almost came and went without a win over the Hurricanes.
Ask all of your Notre Dame friends (if you are unfortunate enough to have Notre Dame friends) how all of those top-five recruiting classes brought in by Charlie Weis have worked out. Weis has more ‘Parade All American’, ‘Five Star’ prospects than he does wins. Remember it can’t be Weis’s fault, he is a genius.
Yet, every year the hype on National Signing Day gets larger and larger (…resisting Charlie Weis waistline joke…).
For the ultimate reality check on the crapshoot that is National Signing Day, check out the early projected drafts. Is it any wonder that the top 5 NFL prospects this year look very little like the top 5 prospects coming out of high school 3 or 4 years ago? Would Matt Ryan and Darren McFadden have ended up at Boston College and Arkansas respectively if they had been the two most sought after high school seniors?
Of course if you are a Five Star recruit that fails in college, you can always turn in a great combine performance and jump right back up the draft board.
