Moving the drills to prime time was a bit weird.
This was the year that the NFL decided to move the combine’s positional drills to prime time, and while there wasn’t a graphic dip in performance, nobody seemed incredibly happy about the switch.
As Joel A. Erickson of Indystar.com reported, the aforementioned Jeff Foster, who runs the National Invitational Camp (combine) staff and a Combine Working Group of five general managers, including the Colts’ Chris Ballard, have spent the past six months working on the new timing.
Foster, for one, would have preferred a more gradual rollout.
“I will tell you that strategically, I never would have implemented this much change in any one year, simply because of the potential domino effect it can have on the logistics involved in the event,” Foster said. “With regard to that, it’s been an incredible challenge.”
Per Bleacher Report’s Matt Miller, agents are not happy about the lags in engagement and the longer days that they believe could make their players more susceptible to injury.
“If [the NFL] is going to make guys stand around and wait for hours to workout, ours will bow out next year,” one agent told Miller. “We’re not risking hamstrings, ACLs and Achilles’ for TV money we don’t see a part of.”
One trainer said that soft tissue injuries could be on the rise with the new time slot, and the general belief is that the NFL will solve any complaints about a prime time combine by moving the whole thing three hours back from Indianapolis to Los Angeles. And the monetization of the combine has prospect agents wondering anew: Why aren’t our players compensated for their participation? As usual, the league us caught between saying over and over that it cares about player safety and value, and enacting things that seem to go the other way.