At the Scouting Combine, more than 300 prospects find themselves facing questions from 32 prospective employers. And no matter how many times the NFL expresses disapproval of questions posed by specific teams to specific players, stories still emerge regarding inappropriate questions.
As mentioned earlier in the evening, LSU running back Derrius Guice said on SiriusXM NFL Radio that a team asked Guice if he likes men. But that wasn’t all of it.
Here’s the full quote from Guice: “Some people really try to get in your head, man, and really just test your reaction and see what your reaction is going to be. I’d go in one room and a team would ask me, ‘Do I like men?’ just to see my reaction. They’d try to bring up one of my family members or somebody and tell me, ‘Hey, man, I heard your mom sells herself. How do you feel about that?’ Just random stuff like that, man, to see how you respond. Even though I know those things aren’t true and they know those things aren’t true, they’ll still hit you with it to see how you’ll react to it.”
The desire to stir a reaction -- presumably to get past the pre-programmed responses that players are coached to provide -- doesn’t justify asking inappropriate questions. For Guice, he faced not only an inappropriate question about sexuality but also a reprise of the question that once was notoriously posed to receiver Dez Bryant.
If teams can’t be trusted to not ask inappropriate questions, the NFL should require all teams to record all interactions between all teams and all prospects. That way, there can be no ambiguity regarding what was and wasn’t said, and there can be no ability to escape accountability when lines are crossed.