Bengals coach Marvin Lewis, who showed last year that he’s willing to overlook a bad Pro Day workout featuring a shirtless watch-it-wiggle, see-it-jiggle donut run, recently commented on the process of preparing for the pre-draft T-shirt-and-shorts workouts.
Appearing with our pal Dan Dakich of 1070 the Fan in Indianapolis (via SportsRadioInterviews.com), Lewis called the concept of Scouting Combine and Pro Day prep “asinine.”
"[T]hey spend three or four years with a strength coach on a college campus and as soon as the season’s over they go somewhere else to some guy who doesn’t know them from a hole in the wall and pay this guy a bunch of money,” Lewis said. “It doesn’t make any sense at all. It used to be that they had to pay for it and now it’s part of the agent deal. They’ve cultivated a whole industry out of it. It doesn’t make sense. It’s actually asinine that if I go to school in Florida, now I have to go to Arizona to train. If I go to school in Arizona, I have to go to Georgia to train. These guys have the best facilities and the best people working with them year round and now all the sudden they got to go somewhere else. You don’t need to go away. A football player is a football player.”
Though we think the entire process is asinine, the reality is that as long as teams believe that tangible measurements are important, agents charged with getting these guys drafted as high as possible realize that success depends in part upon a great showing in the Underwear Olympics. So while Lewis is right -- a football player is a football player -- the Scouting Combine and the Pro Day workouts don’t entail playing football. They require football players to engage in specific track-and-field activities, and the paid experts to whom the players go after leaving school are far better suited to get the players ready than the guys who were responsible for getting them ready to play football.