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"Sometimes a player will have no history of injuries but the doctors will say that his knee is a little loose," said Sherman Lewis, the offensive coordinator of the Minnesota Vikings. Lewis is new to the Vikings and was reluctant to speak about the team's medical practices. But Sherman said the doctors at one of his former teams (which include the San Francisco 49ers and Green Bay Packers) rated the players on a scale of 1 to 3, where 1 was a clean bill of health and 3 indicated some problem that disqualified them as draft picks. Other teams use a 1 to 5 scale. "A lot of this is more of an art than a science," Lewis said. "You just add the medical information to the rest. Some players are so good you have to take a chance on them."

Huizenga, an internist who now practices in Beverly Hills, said the pre-draft checks are supposed to protect teams from unpleasant surprises. But sometimes it's the young player who gets the surprise. Doctors found a quarterback with a rare bleeding disorder. Several times they've discovered cancer.

"Each team gives its doctors a secret sheet of paper with special requests," Huizenga said. "The scouting team wants specific information on particular players it hopes to draft. But horrible things still happened [at the Raiders]. Once we were drafting a guy and he was in the hospital for back surgery at the time. It had slipped right through."

Dr. Elliott Hershman is the orthopedist for the New York Jets as well as the New York Islanders hockey team. When he takes his turn bending over players on the combine examining tables, Hershman looks for possible arthritis, unstable joints or old injuries that could be aggravated. "When I started doing this 15 years ago, the players arrived with all kinds of problems," he said. "Now, with the advances in sports medicine -- arthroscopy and MRIs -- we see healthier players coming into the league than 15 years ago."

In addition to the medical exams, which are repeated when players are traded or move around the league as free agents, recruits at the combine take intelligence tests. Here the combine offers teams a unique opportunity, because the NFL Players Association forbids such tests after a player is hired. The league standard is the Illinois Wonderlic test, a 12-minute battery of 50 questions that start out simple and get more difficult. Quarterback Todd Husek of Stanford and defensive back Ahmed Plummer of Ohio State led the field of 327 test-takers with 39 right answers, according to Football Insider, one of many pre-draft Web sites for NFL junkies. According to the site, Crawford scored 31 on the Wonderlic; only 19 test takers at the combine scored 30 or higher. National Invitational Camp, which runs the combine and administers the Wonderlic test, does not comment on scores.

The test may be more useful for raising questions about a player than providing answers. "The test gives us something to investigate," said Young, who began his professional career as a high school coach and served as general manager of the Giants in their Super Bowl seasons in the 1980s. He said that most successful quarterbacks have scored at least a 22 since teams began using the test in 1968. Young distinguishes between schooling and intelligence -- he has given oral exams to players who could not read well enough to take the Wonderlic. For many positions, Young said, the essential question is whether the player has sufficient ability to learn and remember plays, and to remain focused on a task.

Young pioneered the use of personality inventories with the Giants, which still use a 460-question Meyers-Briggs inventory to assess the psyches of prospective players. "Who knows how well balanced a player should be?" Young wonders. "Well-balanced individuals don't usually look for jobs where they have to hit other people as hard as they can. This is just another tool. We try to talk to them and get a feel for who they are and how they grew up."

Young, who says he had room for no more than two "head cases" on a team when he was coaching, acknowledges that different teams have different standards -- different cultures of adjustment, if you will.

The Vikings are frequently congratulated for taking All-Pro wide receiver Randy Moss in the first round of the 1998 draft despite the his reputation for trouble off the field. "We did well with Randy, but we got burned on Dimitrius Underwood," said Dennis Green, head coach of the Vikings. Underwood, a 6-foot-6, 280-pound defensive end from Michigan State, left Minnesota's training camp the day after signing a $5 million contract, telling the team he didn't want to play football anymore. He later signed with the Miami Dolphins, was injured and was reported to have attempted to kill himself before briefly checking into a mental health center.

"Now it is starting to look like Dimitrius' problems were the sort that the medical staff should have caught," Green told me in the lobby of his Indianapolis hotel. The Cowboys also believe Underwood has a treatable malady. The team signed him last month.

Casey Crawford, the tight end from Virginia, was interviewed about his body proportions, not his brain: "They asked me, 'What kind of [weight] lifting do you do?'" he said. "Things like: 'I've noticed you have very developed thighs and calves. But your upper body is not as developed as your lower half. Is that because you focus on your lower half and not your upper half when you lift?' They start nit-picking: Is that a physical thing? Is that how you were born, your genetics? Or is that something they can try to manipulate and change once you get to the NFL?"

The combine is also the place to spot a gifted athlete who might be molded into a football player. Leif Larson, a 300-pound Norwegian judo and boxing champion is one such candidate. Although he played only two years of football at the University of Texas at El Paso, he created a sensation at the combine when he bench-pressed a 225-pound barbell 45 times without stopping -- a record performance. Many highly regarded recruits his size did fewer than 30 repetitions. With Larson's score of 34 on the Wonderlic test, a team may draft him as a special project.
salon.com | April 12, 2000

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