The football world converged on Indianapolis for the NFL scouting combine this weekend, and among the gaggle of reporters were both Aaron Schatz and Michael David Smith. Please allow us to empty our little spiral notebooks in true Peter King style. Or, perhaps, Larry King style. ("You won't see a better-conditioned athlete than Missouri State punter Jonathan Scifres ... I know movies, and Ultraviolet is a sure Oscar contender ... Watch out for those Kansas City Royals this year...")
-- The fans like to talk about 40 times, but the most important part of the combine is the opportunity to give every prospect a physical exam, and the second most important part is the one-on-one interview. The Houston Texans don’t know exactly how fast Reggie Bush can run 40 yards right now, but they do know if he has any health problems, and they know if he seems like the kind of guy they want to have in their locker room. That alone makes the combine worthwhile.
-- I think the most surprising thing I heard anyone say in Indianapolis took place during a conversation with Peter King about Brett Favre. "I don’t have his number," King said. I knew Favre had become an increasingly private person, but when King (who is perceived as closer to Favre than any other member of the media) can’t get in touch with him, Favre has really withdrawn.
-- Tom Coughlin said running backs are in rapid decline by age 30. When I pointed out that his own Tiki Barber is about to turn 31, Coughlin said, "He doesn’t know that. He thinks he’s 25."
-- Jay Cutler was impressive in dealing with the media, and impressive by doing everything asked of him during the workouts. And his 23 repetitions of 225 pounds on the bench press must have opened some eyes – a quarterback doesn’t have to have the kind of upper-body strength, but it does indicate that he spends a lot of time in the weight room, and coaches will love that.
-- Matt Leinart was adamant that he wouldn’t mind playing in New Orleans. "If I were to go to the Saints it would be an honor," he said.
-- Vince Young, asked what NFL coaches had said to him about his throwing motion, replied, "There’s nothing really wrong with it. It’s the media that’s been talking about it."
-- Nick Saban was obviously annoyed with all the questions about Ricky Williams and his fourth positive drug test. Saban called Williams one of the five best players he has ever coached in terms of his attitude at practice and his work ethic. What I want to know is, if a habitual marijuana smoker can have such a great attitude and work ethic, why does the NFL suspend players who test positive?
-- The Green Bay Packers made it as clear as could be that they’ll take the best player available with the fifth overall pick. Both general manager Ted Thompson and coach Mike McCarthy used the phrase "best player available" multiple times in their press conferences. Even though the team used its first-round pick on quarterback Aaron Rodgers, Thompson and McCarthy said they will consider taking a quarterback. I asked McCarthy why he preferred Alex Smith to Rodgers when he was San Francisco’s offensive coordinator last year and the 49ers took Smith first overall, and he said he thought Rodgers was more polished but Smith had great potential. Neither Thompson nor McCarthy would speculate about whether Favre will retire. Thompson added that the team is negotiating with Ahman Green, but he didn’t sound enthusiastic about it. I think he expects Green to be elsewhere next year.
-- One player who clearly understands what NFL teams want of him: LSU’s Skyler Green. He said he was willing to play running back, third-down back, slot receiver, kickoff returner, punt returner, or whatever it took to make a team.
-- Jeff Fisher said that if Matt Leinart becomes a Tennessee Titan, the offense he’ll run is the same as the one he ran in college under Norm Chow, now the Titans’ offensive coordinator. "We’ve installed coach Chow’s system. That’s our offense," Fisher said.
-- Mike Holmgren has long been an influential member of the league’s competition committee. He has just resigned from it. I have no idea if his anger over the officiating in the Super Bowl has anything to do with it, but that’s one logical inference.
-- I knew Lendale White was big, but I didn’t know how big. White said he weighed 253 pounds on the day of the Rose Bowl, but he’s down to 238 now. When asked why he was so big in early January, he said, "Thanksgiving and Christmas."
-- Jeff Foster, executive director of National Football Scouting, which runs the combine for the league, said the combine’s contract with Indianapolis expires after next year, and he sounded like he’d love to find a warmer climate for the event. (It used to take place in Tempe, Ariz.)
-- Penn State quarterback Michael Robinson doesn’t like the idea of moving to a new position. "I’ve had teams talk to me about safety," he said. "I haven’t tackled anybody in six or seven years."
-- The NFL’s PR people did a good job of making the players available to the media. Big-name players like Leinart, Bush and Young were given spots at a podium for the crush of reporters, while the lesser-name players were seated at tables where a few home-town reporters could talk to them. But there was one exception: Marcus Vick, the Virginia Tech quarterback whose problems both on the field and off the field are a major story, was moved to a small table even though dozens of members of the media wanted to talk to him. The league obviously didn’t want Vick to be a big story coming out of Indianapolis.
-- DeAngelo Hall was one of the handful of current players in town. Hall, who recently won the NFL’s Fastest Man competition, said that when he was coming out of Virginia Tech, he ran a 4.31-second 40 at the combine.
-- When I asked Detroit coach Rod Marinelli why the Lions put the franchise tag on left tackle Jeff Backus, Marinelli said it was a no-brainer because Backus is "a tremendous football player." Marinelli, who previously served as the Tampa Bay Buccaneers’ defensive line coach, said size wasn’t important to him when evaluating a defensive lineman, an interesting comment for a guy who just took over the team with the huge Shaun Rogers and Dan Wilkinson plugging the middle of the defense. Marinelli said the most important trait for a defensive lineman is hand speed.
-- My most interesting experience was sitting in the bod pod, that futuristic contraption that measures things like metabolism and body fat percentage. If you're claustrophobic, you probably won't enjoy the experience of stripping down to a pair of compression shorts and being enclosed in an egg-shaped apparatus for 50 seconds. But learning that I have 30 pounds of fat in my body was a wonderful motivation to get some exercise when I got home from Indy.
-- Reggie Bush had the best line of the combine, answering the question of what he would like about playing in Texas with, "no state tax."
-- I disagree. I thought the best line of the combine belonged to Jeremy Bloom, when a reporter asked him if he was going to be comfortable with contract clauses that restricted him from skiing or other off-season activities. Bloom's response: "I think Kellen Winslow took care of that for me."
-- As for Nick Saban, I thought he was going to go Hulk around the fifth or sixth Ricky Williams question. "Don't ask about Ricky ... you won't like me when you ask about Ricky..."
-- It would be easy to ignore the fact that these prospects are even in the building because there is so much concern and talk about the Collective Bargaining Agreement. Every coach or general manager who gets up to the podium should just save us all some time by starting their press conference with the following: "I don't know if there's been progress on the CBA, we all want it to get done, we've got two plans for free agency depending on what happens, and I don't know if a college quarterback with an unorthodox throwing motion has to change his style in order to be a successful quarterback in the National Football League. Do you have any non-CBA, non-Vince Young questions?"
(And yes, Tim Gerheim's working on a CBA article for FO, for those looking for one.)
-- One of the many ramifications if there is no CBA and we enter that "2006 by different rules, 2007 uncapped" scenario: it will be even harder than usual for teams at the top of the draft to negotiate contracts with the highest draft picks, since they can only pro-rate bonuses over four years.
-- Part of my goal in coming here was to make connections with people I could use for quotes in future stories. The problem is, I have a terrible memory for names and faces. To give an example, when I walked into the Convention Center on the first day I wandered into was a large seminar for agents being held by Players Inc. On a bench in the hallway outside was a somewhat familiar-looking guy talking on his cell phone. I know this guy, I thought, who is he? Of course, he gave me a look like, "Why are you staring at me?" and so I walked away. Five minutes later it finally hit me why I thought I knew this guy. It was Drew Rosenhaus.
-- My favorite event on the Players Inc. seminar schedule: a 15-minute presentation on the Arena Football salary rules.
-- I would like to thank the folks who voted for Mike Sando as "local writer who deserves more attention." I introduced myself to him yesterday and we ended up hanging out for a couple hours in between scribbling notes on random coach statements. He is definitely a reporter in the stats-friendly FO camp. He has game logs for Seattle games that even have some of the elements we're tracking with the game charting project, and he's very comfortable using this data in his articles. I gave him one of the extra copies of PFP 2005 that I brought with me. Just another reason to hit Seattle on the next book tour. He was also nice enough to introduce me to John Clayton -- Sando actually was Clayton's replacement when Clayton went to ESPN.
-- Most interesting answer I've heard from a prospect, when a reporter asked wide receiver Mike Hass of Oregon State which NFL player's career he wanted to emulate, he said "Ricky Proehl." Not the answer you would expect from a 22-year-old kid.
-- Nearly every question for new Vikings coach Brad Childress was about Daunte Culpepper, but near the end someone asked about running backs and Childress said, "well, we've got a depth problem there, we've only got two right now." Michael Bennett and Moe Williams are both free agents but it sounds like they're writing off Onterrio Smith at this point. Someone did ask specifically about Onterrio later and Childress mentioned that they are not allowed to talk to him until May 1.
-- I did get up to Gary Kubiak after his press conference and told him that we had named our player projection system after him, at which point he looked at me like I had three heads.
-- The city of Indianapolis wanted to charge the NFL an absurd amount of money for Internet connections so we're all going off dial-up. It's like living in the Stone Age.
-- All of the prospects are walking around in these grey sweatshirts with their position and number on the front, name and number on the back. Will Carroll referred to this as fashion from the Bill Belichick Collection.
-- Most of these guys majored in stuff like "sports management" or whatever, but defensive tackle Babatunde Oshinowo of Stanford stayed in school four years and has a degree in electrical engineering. Impressive.
(Second post, 2:15pm)
-- Yes, I can confirm that Vince Young scored a 6 on the Wonderlic. And yes, people are talking about him falling down the draft board. What you have to understand is that once upon a time, guys would come into the combine in all kinds of shape, some good, some bad. Now, almost all of these prospects pay to go to predraft performance camps where they get into terrific shape, practice interviewing skills so that they can impress teams, and take tons of practice Wonderlic tests. So the problem is less that Vince Young scored a 6 on the Wonderlic, and more that Vince Young apparently didn't care enough about the combine to prepare for the Wonderlic so he would have at least scored, I don't know, 15 or something. Which is bad, but not as bad as a 6. What does this say about his work ethic and prima donna syndrome. I've also had it pointed out to me that Vince Young is associated with some, shall we say, unpleasant elements of the Houston community. (Do the names Timmy and Jimmy ring a bell for anyone?)
(Late edit: Given the current story coming out of the NFL, I need to change the first sentence here to "Yes, I can confirm that the Wonderlic test score for Vince Young was a 6." Note the change in subject and object relationship there.)
-- I must resist the urge to ask D'Quell Jackson if he feels a rivalry with D'Brickashaw Ferguson. D'Quell was one of the losers in the media interview game; they have two podiums on opposite ends of the room, and he had to go at the same time as A.J. Hawk. Everyone congregated on the other side of the room. The only guy I saw who had it worse was D.J. Shockley who had to go at the same time that Matt Leinart was on the other side of the room. Shockley had a good sense of humor about it, though.
-- Does anyone know if there's a consensus number one pick for 2007? Right now we're thinking the lowest category in the projection system will be called "The Quest for Quinn."
-- This thing just dies on Sunday. Unlike the last two days, there aren't any coaches or GMs coming in here to talk to us, just players, linebackers and defensive backs today. And not only does the combine die down, but the Indianapolis Convention Center does the strangest cross-scheduling I could possibly imagine. Literally right next to the NFL combine -- with all the people from both events congregating together in the hallway -- is a huge elementary school cheerleading competition. So walking around are all these eight-year-old girls plastered with makeup and their moms, mixed in with colossal defensive linemen in grey sweatshirts, assistant coaches, and random members of the media. One guy said to me, "You know, this would be a lot more useful if these girls were about ten years older, then we could see which of these college kids could keep their hands off the ladies."
-- Also, the annoying autograph hunters are still here. I hate those people. They're just going to turn around and sell this stuff on eBay. I half expected one of them to pull a set of skis out of a bag and hand them to Jeremy Bloom to autograph.
-- This is really odd, but they give you this list of all the kids invited to the combine with position group, sweatshirt number, name, and university. And they give the full name of the university, so you've got Vince Young from "Texas-Austin" and Jason Pociask from "Wisconsin-Madison" and Kevin Boothe from "Cornell-NY." First of all, I didn't expect to find an offensive lineman from Cornell here, and second, what other Cornell is there? By the way, Marcus Vick apparently went to "Virginia Polytechnic Institute" so if the NFL doesn't work out, perhaps he has a career in laptop repair or help desk administration.
-- The only school that isn't listed with its full name? It just says "Ohio St" with no "The."