As quarterback Bryce Young said Thursday on #PFTPM, “the power dynamics definitely shift” between college football and pro football.
In college, players pick where they enroll and, nowadays, whether they stay. In the NFL, the players have no real say. They go where they’re told to go.
The teams have all the power. They select the players whose choice becomes play for that team or play for no one. It contributes to a dehumanizing of the entire process, because there’s simply no reason for teams to care about human factors when the human beings who become the draft picks are painted into a corner by the nature of the process.
It leads to plenty of abuses of player rights. While it likely wouldn’t be easy to prove that any legal rights have been violated, it’s more a basic question of right and wrong. And it’s wrong for teams to leak to reporters certain types of private information that players provide during the pre-draft process, because they can’t really say no to the requests -- without being labeled as difficult (which then would be leaked, too).
For years, the Wonderlic was the source of the biggest pre-draft information abuses. And, yes, at one point we shared the numbers that were leaked to PFT and/or other publications. As we evolved, we realized that the relentless quest for information and clicks should have limits. Just because teams are willing to leak negative test scores (possibly in order to get a player to slide far enough so that they can draft him) doesn’t mean that the media has to use them. We don’t, and we won’t.
Others have no qualms about doing it. And it has now spread from the Wonderlic to the S2. Player results are being leaked, and then publicized. They shouldn’t be. Especially since not every team even uses the S2.
Too many fans don’t think of players as people. The knee-jerk willingness that some reporters still have to publicize any and all negative information about an incoming prospect, despite the obvious agendas that teams and agents have at this time of the year, does nothing to nudge fans toward thinking of football players as anything other than robots, programmed to amuse and entertain us.
The media shouldn’t traffic in information that is deliberately leaked for potentially nefarious purposes, and that can make a player look bad in the public eye. To the extent that three months of poking and prodding and other indignities are justified by calling it all a job interview, ask yourself this question -- in what job interview does the information you provide to the employer get handed to reporters who rush to use it in support of the argument that you’re an undesirable candidate for employment?
So you won’t see Wonderlic numbers here. And you won’t see S2 numbers here, either. While that won’t keep the information from being leaked elsewhere, it definitely will keep it from being amplified on this platform.