Written by Jeff Rich

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I have mentioned it before, but I’ll remind you that the NFL Draft, while critical, is not my favorite part of being a Browns fan.  I’m most interested in the actual football games being played, and what ultimately piques my interest are the playoff games that they are bound to play in and win some day.  So, you will just have to forgive me if I don’t get too caught up in the mock drafts, or any of the brew-ha-ha that leads up to it.  Don’t get me wrong, I eat up the analysis of this game, and I often leave the NFL Network on as background noise when I’m doing things slightly more productive than watching the boob tube.  That said, I’ll be skipping the NFL Combine taking place in Indianapolis this week.

There isn’t a better way to put this than to just tell you, it’s boring.  Sure, it’s important, but even for a pigskin junkie like myself, it doesn’t make for good theater.  Of course, this is an evaluation tool for the draft, one of many, and the draft is a critical part of building a Super Bowl Champion, but it isn’t the only tool.  Browns fans can rest assured that the brain trust of the organization will get everything they can out of Indianapolis this week, but it’s certainly only a fraction of the evaluation process to determine what they will do with their nine selections in April.  It’s like how Gym Class figures into your overall grade point average, or how your GPA figures into what kind of job regular people get when they finish school.  Truthfully, and this is my opinion without insight from any team executive, the most invaluable piece of the NFL Combine is not televised.

Behind closed doors, job interviews are taking place for a lot of people.  Behavioral and mental evaluations are being done, each team is allowed sixty 15 minute interviews.  This is where these young mean go beyond auditioning to be professional football players, and evolve into interviewing for a specific role in a system on a team.  The 335 invited participants obviously have the football skills to warrant their invitation to this exclusive tryout, so we already know these guys can play football, but the question comes down to, can they learn it at the next level?  Can they be coached to exploit their skills, to play football within the bounds of an organization’s philosophy?

Speaking of knowing these guys can play, for most of the guys we’re going to see play on Sundays, there’s quite a bit of video out there.  For regular people, there’s YouTube and ESPN, among many other sites and channels.  You can see any number of highlight films accompanied by atrocious rap music or Drowning Pool’s “Bodies”, but for everything available to the general public, it pales in comparison to the quantity and quality of video exclusively available to the people whose opinions actually matter.

There is generally three or four years of tape on the prospects that the Browns will be looking at with their picks at 4, 22, 37, 66, and so on.  However, I do understand that the tape might be as plentiful for a player from Mount Union, Hillside, Liberty, or Fordham; the physical aspects of the combine should definitely help that unknown player, but the hype never surrounds them.  We get hung up with whether or not Andrew Luck and Robert Griffin III are going to throw this week, as if Stanford and Baylor weren’t televised enough to give a sufficient sample of what they can or cannot do with their arms.

For others, there is there are the college all-star games that are led by NFL coaching staffs.  The Senior Bowl and the East-West Shrine game are less about the games themselves, and more about the practices, the one on one time.  The scouts and GM’s probably learn a lot more about the top tier talent at those games than a glorified workout will ever tell them.  However, if you see a player perform in a game, you know they can play football, and a glimpse of brilliance can translate into consistent brilliance.  The best example of that is what Bill Walsh saw in Charles Haley, one of the best defensive players not in the Pro Football Hall of Fame.  What you see in the combine only proves that you can be a workout warrior.

A very unofficial list of best combine performers includes such heroes as Mike Mamula and John Engleberger.  Do you know those names?  I sure as hell do not.  If you want to talk about more recent names, ones you still might remember from their college days, I can tell you about the brilliant workouts of Ohio State’s Mike Kudla and Vernon Gholston, and neither is bound for Canton, Hawaii, or even a prolonged NFL career.  Gholston is out of work, looking for this third NFL team since being drafted sixth overall by the Jets in 2008, and Kudla doesn’t even have a Wiki page.  Even the NFL Network’s Top Ten Combine Performances since 2008, which features Ghoslton and fellow bust Aaron Curry, doesn’t exactly instill confidence in me as gospel for talent evaluation.

I’m not telling you not to watch the NFL Combine, especially if you need your football fix.  Per the sentiments of Ray Lewis especially, I would much rather you watch something that doesn’t entertain me than going out and committing crime, and you can even appreciate it for what it is as a tool that will help your favorite team identify talent.  You might want to keep in mind that what’s going on in Indianapolis isn’t the end all and be all.  For Browns fans, you might remember that Joe Haden ran poorly, but that it turned out that he was injured, and his performance has been satisfactory at worst since being selected 7^th overall in 2010.  For fans that pay attention to the headliners, I can remind you that Tom Brady threw poorly and Peyton Manning did not participate.

It's just that for some of the guys, it's all about Pro Day, a day that's about them and their teammates (and other area hopefuls).  The tables turn a bit for Pro Day, where the NFL comes to the player instead of the prospect having to foray into the snakepit that the NFL Combine can be.  A player's stock can rise at Pro Day, where the pressure tends to be off, but it can also fall.  Browns Tight End Jordan Cameron saw his stock go up when scouts and NFL types visited USC, while Clemson's Da'Quan Bowers dropped from Top Ten, if not Top One, consideration when his knee became a concern at his Pro Day.  You take the good with the bad, but it obviously shows there's more to The Path to The Draft than results from the NFL Combine.  It's as simple to see as the mularkey that Saved By The Bell tried to push on us with Zack Morris (a slacker) getting into Yale based solely on SAT scores; there's more than one way to skin a cat, and more than a few ways to evaluate the NFL readiness of a college football star.

Just remember, there’s a lot of other factors that go into determining who to draft, who not to draft, and what players to give up the farm in order to get.  The Combine is important, but it’s imperative that you “combine” it with other factors when weighing personnel decisions with first year players.  We’re still nine weeks from the NFL Draft, please try to hold yourself together until then.