An NFL general manager stands in his suite at Lucas Oil Stadium watching the combine workouts. I'm not using his name; even though he's merely admitting what everyone privately acknowledges, he worries about saying it aloud because the combine is such a growth industry for the NFL. After years of coming to Indianapolis, he now understands that his presence here -- everyone's presence -- is simply to play a small part in a televised show, even if real futures are at stake. The players are running on the field down below, and they are running on the screens playing all around him, broadcast by the NFL Network. From his suite, this GM can barely read the names and numbers on their jerseys, so he watches on TV. Like most guys, he has an iPad where the stats and scores and results automatically update in his draft software. Except the results are always posted faster on the live television broadcast than in his own system. That's what cues his sense of dull dread: If I can just watch this on television, and if I don't even really care about the results anyway, then why exactly am I here?
Day One, Part I
Wednesday night, my first at the combine, first stop, first drink: a Guinness at the J.W. Marriott hotel bar, the front porch of the NFL combine. I nursed the beer and watched the football world stalk the room, looking for someone who might have information or want information. An agent named Kyle Strongin pulled up a chair. A long time ago, he worked at Ole Miss, which is in the town where I live, so we swapped Coach O stories and caught up on life. This year, he had three clients at the combine: Wisconsin running back Alec Ingold, South Carolina lineman Zack Bailey and Clemson cult hero receiver Hunter Renfrow.
He liked his guys, and he pulled out his phone to show me a picture that kind of sums up the singular question hovering over the combine: What can a team tell about a player by looking at him run, lift weights and flex? Kyle's photo showed the now-viral image of Ole Miss' D.K. Metcalf standing with his shirt off, his chest swollen and rippled. D.K. sent me two crying-laughing emojis when I texted him after it first hit Twitter, when his 1.9 percent body fat melted the internet. In Kyle's photoshopped version, next to him was Renfrow, short and skinny, looking exactly like the kind of player a teammate might mistake for a manager, or maybe a waterboy -- which actually happened his freshman year at Clemson.
Then Kyle's photo listed both their stats against Alabama.
Renfrow put up better numbers.
All Renfrow has ever done is catch big passes in big games and help his team win. The most recent Super Bowl MVP, Julian Edelman, is a player like him. And still, Renfrow's agent spent the week of the combine working to convince people to trust themselves and not a series of athletic tests that don't actually reveal much about a football player's future. That's the funny thing. The combine is a place where you can watch the battle between facts and narrative play out: Even though the smart football minds said they didn't learn much from the results, the drills being broadcast created an image that a player would have to struggle to shed. Hunter was in town fighting group-think about his size and speed. One scouting guy told Renfrow's agent, "I wouldn't draft him but he'd start for us."
So Renfrow needed to do well enough to let his career define him instead of these times and reps. Strongin told me that Hunter would run his 40-yard dash on Saturday. If he could score in the low 4.5s, then a team will draft him in the third or fourth round as a starting slot receiver.
If he ran much slower than that, he might not get drafted at all.
Day One, Part II
This year's combine was my first, which made me not quite prepared for the daily marathon: from morning coffee at the J.W. Starbucks, where the new Browns head coach would ask for his coffee cool enough to chug -- "kids' temperature," one barista said to another; to the convention center where nearly a thousand reporters look for state secrets about hamstrings and muscle cramps; to one of several wood-paneled, masculine steakhouses like St. Elmo, with its horseradish-spiked shrimp cocktail; to a restaurant bar named Prime 47, where nearly every night ends up in a haze of passed business cards, whispered gossip and behavior some coaches would rather not hit the internet. A lot of secrets get told, news broken. Alcohol numbs everyone's deeply hardwired urge to lie.
The NFL is famously secretive and paranoid, so these bars in Indianapolis are among the few places in the world where you can actually ask a straight question and get a true answer. The curtain gets yanked back and, like in the movie, the guy pulling the levers always seems smaller up close. There's John Elway eating at P.F. Chang's. There's Dan Marino drinking chardonnay. There's Sean Payton dining with two reporters in a dark steakhouse. There's every agent and scout and general manager moving in a carefully defined orbit around downtown Indianapolis. Prime awaits at the end of the night. It's a verb. Let's Prime.
Women react strongly to the predatory energy at Prime -- "Soooo many men," a female reporter said, standing next to me in a corner -- and most of the women I work with have stories, some of which make you roll your eyes and some of which make you ball up your fists. Around 2 a.m., I sat at the bar and watched someone grab the waitress' ass. When I pulled the waitress aside to ask if she was OK, she smiled thinly and said, "Welcome to the combine." (...)
For reporters and coaches and scouts, the combine is part work and part play, like a legal convention in Las Vegas or something. Yes, there's combine stuff to do, but that all feels secondary on the ground to drinking expensive wine and eating big steaks at places like St. Elmo's -- the emotional center of Indy during the combine, with its great light and high ceilings.
Normally their most popular steak is the filet. The week of the combine it was the dry-aged Tomahawk ribeye. Big cabernets flew out of the cellar, Jerry Jones buying his large formats of Silver Oak -- jeroboams and methuselahs, son -- while smaller fish pop for 750s of Caymus. A St. Elmo's staff member said the combine crowds don't buy the really great wine, just wine that normal people will recognize as expensive. The strut is more important than the taste. Drinks flowed. Shrimp cocktails arrived, and huge steaks, too: bone-in, medium rare. A reporter sent a round of tequila shots to a table of Patriots PR people. They'd had quite the week, after the Orchids of Asia. Outside, some NFL guys walked down the street joking about needing to find a massage parlor to get a "Krafty." (...)
The scouts know this week doesn't matter, but the league knows that fans will watch on television and that talk radio and popular culture will turn this into an essential event on the annual sporting calendar. That's the tension that everyone can feel even if they can't articulate it. The whole thing has the whiff of reality television, with a twist: As these kinds of drills become less and less relevant to the best minds in the game, they become more and more important in the culture. Imagine if getting kicked off "The Bachelor" meant you had to stay single forever.
Day One, Part I
Wednesday night, my first at the combine, first stop, first drink: a Guinness at the J.W. Marriott hotel bar, the front porch of the NFL combine. I nursed the beer and watched the football world stalk the room, looking for someone who might have information or want information. An agent named Kyle Strongin pulled up a chair. A long time ago, he worked at Ole Miss, which is in the town where I live, so we swapped Coach O stories and caught up on life. This year, he had three clients at the combine: Wisconsin running back Alec Ingold, South Carolina lineman Zack Bailey and Clemson cult hero receiver Hunter Renfrow.
He liked his guys, and he pulled out his phone to show me a picture that kind of sums up the singular question hovering over the combine: What can a team tell about a player by looking at him run, lift weights and flex? Kyle's photo showed the now-viral image of Ole Miss' D.K. Metcalf standing with his shirt off, his chest swollen and rippled. D.K. sent me two crying-laughing emojis when I texted him after it first hit Twitter, when his 1.9 percent body fat melted the internet. In Kyle's photoshopped version, next to him was Renfrow, short and skinny, looking exactly like the kind of player a teammate might mistake for a manager, or maybe a waterboy -- which actually happened his freshman year at Clemson.Then Kyle's photo listed both their stats against Alabama.
Renfrow put up better numbers.
All Renfrow has ever done is catch big passes in big games and help his team win. The most recent Super Bowl MVP, Julian Edelman, is a player like him. And still, Renfrow's agent spent the week of the combine working to convince people to trust themselves and not a series of athletic tests that don't actually reveal much about a football player's future. That's the funny thing. The combine is a place where you can watch the battle between facts and narrative play out: Even though the smart football minds said they didn't learn much from the results, the drills being broadcast created an image that a player would have to struggle to shed. Hunter was in town fighting group-think about his size and speed. One scouting guy told Renfrow's agent, "I wouldn't draft him but he'd start for us."
So Renfrow needed to do well enough to let his career define him instead of these times and reps. Strongin told me that Hunter would run his 40-yard dash on Saturday. If he could score in the low 4.5s, then a team will draft him in the third or fourth round as a starting slot receiver.
If he ran much slower than that, he might not get drafted at all.
Day One, Part II
This year's combine was my first, which made me not quite prepared for the daily marathon: from morning coffee at the J.W. Starbucks, where the new Browns head coach would ask for his coffee cool enough to chug -- "kids' temperature," one barista said to another; to the convention center where nearly a thousand reporters look for state secrets about hamstrings and muscle cramps; to one of several wood-paneled, masculine steakhouses like St. Elmo, with its horseradish-spiked shrimp cocktail; to a restaurant bar named Prime 47, where nearly every night ends up in a haze of passed business cards, whispered gossip and behavior some coaches would rather not hit the internet. A lot of secrets get told, news broken. Alcohol numbs everyone's deeply hardwired urge to lie.
The NFL is famously secretive and paranoid, so these bars in Indianapolis are among the few places in the world where you can actually ask a straight question and get a true answer. The curtain gets yanked back and, like in the movie, the guy pulling the levers always seems smaller up close. There's John Elway eating at P.F. Chang's. There's Dan Marino drinking chardonnay. There's Sean Payton dining with two reporters in a dark steakhouse. There's every agent and scout and general manager moving in a carefully defined orbit around downtown Indianapolis. Prime awaits at the end of the night. It's a verb. Let's Prime.
Women react strongly to the predatory energy at Prime -- "Soooo many men," a female reporter said, standing next to me in a corner -- and most of the women I work with have stories, some of which make you roll your eyes and some of which make you ball up your fists. Around 2 a.m., I sat at the bar and watched someone grab the waitress' ass. When I pulled the waitress aside to ask if she was OK, she smiled thinly and said, "Welcome to the combine." (...)
For reporters and coaches and scouts, the combine is part work and part play, like a legal convention in Las Vegas or something. Yes, there's combine stuff to do, but that all feels secondary on the ground to drinking expensive wine and eating big steaks at places like St. Elmo's -- the emotional center of Indy during the combine, with its great light and high ceilings.
Normally their most popular steak is the filet. The week of the combine it was the dry-aged Tomahawk ribeye. Big cabernets flew out of the cellar, Jerry Jones buying his large formats of Silver Oak -- jeroboams and methuselahs, son -- while smaller fish pop for 750s of Caymus. A St. Elmo's staff member said the combine crowds don't buy the really great wine, just wine that normal people will recognize as expensive. The strut is more important than the taste. Drinks flowed. Shrimp cocktails arrived, and huge steaks, too: bone-in, medium rare. A reporter sent a round of tequila shots to a table of Patriots PR people. They'd had quite the week, after the Orchids of Asia. Outside, some NFL guys walked down the street joking about needing to find a massage parlor to get a "Krafty." (...)
The scouts know this week doesn't matter, but the league knows that fans will watch on television and that talk radio and popular culture will turn this into an essential event on the annual sporting calendar. That's the tension that everyone can feel even if they can't articulate it. The whole thing has the whiff of reality television, with a twist: As these kinds of drills become less and less relevant to the best minds in the game, they become more and more important in the culture. Imagine if getting kicked off "The Bachelor" meant you had to stay single forever.
by Wright Thompson, ESPN | Read more:
Image: Joe Robbins/Getty Images
