The problem with the NFL’s Combine

Yesterday marked the beginning of the NFL's equivalent to a job interview – that is if companies threw out your resume during the interview and decided whether or not to hire you based on how many copies per minute you could make or how many files you could lift.

With the NFL Combine running through the week, teams will gawk at players 40 times, be awed by how much players can bench press and be wowed by the athletes' verticals.

At the end of the day, NFL scouts and executives will end up forgetting that none of the drills involve a football or are performed in pads, but they will make million dollar decisions based on the drills anyway.

Even though scouts have up to three or four years of tape on these guys playing actual football games, prospects will still rise up draft boards or see their stock plummet based on how perform in a glorified strength and conditioning exercise.

Now it's not that the NFL Combine does not serve a purpose. Rather, NFL executives tend to abuse what the event was created for. Teams will totally throw out a players on the field accomplishments, or lack thereof, and character makeup just because a player weighed in at 260 pounds and could run a 4.4 40 time, and more times than not teams will get burned.

Workout warriors like the University of Florida's Defensive End Carlos Dunlap will see his stock skyrocket after the Combine due to his combination of size and speed, and teams will overlook the fact that he has had multiple off-field issues and that questions about work ethic have circled around him for years.

On the flip side, guys who put together four solid years of quality football will fall because teams would like them to be an inch taller or 10 pounds heavier.

At the end of the day, there is no exact science to the NFL Draft and no one method produces surefire results consistently, but drafting players based on their football abilities rather than by how fast they can run, lift and jump during one week in March couldn't hurt the process.