Emmanuel Sanders didn’t want to be written off as too small at the 2010 Scouting Combine, and so he got a bright idea: Add a lot of water weight.
Sanders said he was worried NFL teams wouldn’t think he was big enough to hold up to the grind at the professional level, so he drank a huge amount of water just before the weigh-in.
“I’m a small guy, so prior to weighing in I ended up drinking like two gallons of water so I was so bloated and full of water, I got up to like 185 pounds, just to show teams that I’m not a small guy,” Sanders said.
Two gallons of water is 17 pounds, meaning Sanders added about 10 percent to his bodyweight just by drinking water. The Steelers apparently thought he was big enough, as they drafted him in the third round.
If anyone else wants to follow in Sanders’ footsteps, they’d better be sure they do so only after submitting to their Combine drug test: A diluted urine sample is considered an attempt to cheat the drug test, which may hurt an NFL player’s draft stock more than an extra 17 pounds will help.