What is the Combine? Well let's start with basic pronunciation first. After you read this post you are going to want to run to your boyfriend to impress him with all the knowledge I am about the drop. It will help your credibility a lot if you don't mispronounce words. So when you start your conversation about the Combine be sure and pronounce it, COMbine...like the piece of machinery, not the thing you do when you mix two things together. Got it? Good. Okay, now onto what this thing is. If it sounds like it might be painful, that's because it is. The NFL Scouting Combine is a week-long training camp held at Lucas Oil Stadium in Indianapolis that happens every year a couple of months before the NFL Draft. Here, college football players perform rigorous physical and mental tests for the benefit of coaches, general managers, and scouts of NFL teams. Basically these men are looking to see how well these players perform to determine their value when it comes time for the draft. Players attend the Combine by invitation only and some higher profile college players who are certain to go high in the draft may not attend at all.
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| What if your whole life depended on how well you could do this? |
As I have mentioned before one of the things I learned during this past season is that to most guys any football is better than no football. It is for this reason that the Combine is televised and you can actually watch these poor guys get put through the ringer. While I have dedicated a good bit of my energies to following the NFL, I will not become someone who sits and watches 18 year old dudes run really fast. That being said there is one very interesting story coming out of the Combine this year and that would be the story of Manti Te-o, the infamous linebacker from Notre Dame who everyone expected to go in the first round of the Draft. In case you have been living under a rock here is Manti Te-o's story in a nutshell. Going into the BCS National Championship game between Alabama and Notre Dame, Te-o won over the hearts of America with the crushing story of how six hours after losing his grandmother Manti Te-o also lost his girlfriend to cancer. A few weeks after the big game a story broke that Manti Te-o's girlfriend never existed. Basically, he met her on the internet and she told him she was a cancer patient and undergoing treatment, they even spoke on the phone, but the whole thing turned out to be a hoax. You can imagine the humiliation that followed. My first reaction to this story when it came out was "who cares?" well it turns out that one of the major things that NFL teams look at is the mental health of the players to see how they will hold up in the locker room and off the field. No team wants someone who is going to be more of a distraction than an asset. Not only did Manti Te-o show up 2 hours late for his press conference at the Combine, but the majority of the questions centered around his fake girlfriend, making it apparent that Te-o will have a lot to prove when he It looks like Manti Te-o is set to show off at the Combine on Monday and his performance will tell if his off the field vulnerabilities are worth overlooking.
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| In addition to Combine drills, Te-o has to work on looking less confused. Toughy. |
If you really want to impress some guys, ask them if they are surprised that the standout Wide Receiver at the combine was Tavon Austin from West Virginia. Tavon Austin not only showed incredible speed running the 40 yard dash in 4.34 seconds (when talking to guys all you have to say is "he ran a four three four forty" and they'll know exactly what you are talking about...these people have there own language!) and also was able to catch the ball pretty well. Analysts are saying that he may have dashed his way into the first round...get it? Dashed? Sorry, the jokes haven't gotten much better during my time off. Be sure to like Gridiron for Girls on Facebook and follow me on twitter @gridiron4girls for more little tid bits from the Combine and the weeks leading up to the Draft.
