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INDIANAPOLIS — The legend of the workout warrior snookering a gullible team at the scouting combine is so entrenched it’s become cliché. Yet someone falls for it every year.
NFL coaches and scouts love to tell you the draft is an inexact science, but too many don’t do their profession’s reputation any favors by swooning over at least one prospect who wows them in shorts or an Indianapolis weight room.
Just ask the Jets, who would surprise no one if GM Mike Tannenbaum uses his usual combine media chat to announce the release of Vernon Gholston — only one of the most notorious workout warriors in the event’s 27-year history.
“What can you say? We’re human,” Ravens GM Ozzie Newsome said. “We’ve all been guilty. It’s a situation where you sometimes forget that these guys aren’t going to play football on Sundays in shorts.”
The Jets only wish they could have remembered that salient fact here three years ago, when Gholston fooled them into making him the No. 6 overall pick with a dazzling display of strength, speed and vertical leap.
Despite a 455-pound bench press, the warning signs about Gholston’s on-field ability were there, too. Many scouts red-flagged the Ohio State defensive end as a one-year wonder after he came out of nowhere as a junior to set the school record with 14 ½ sacks, then immediately declared for the draft. Considering Gholston has failed to notch even one measly sack in three NFL seasons, the Jets now admit they were swayed by his fool’s-gold combine performance.
The Jets hardly are alone in the category of victims, though. Recent combine history is full of other examples, even though the concept of the workout warrior had been well-established as long ago as the late 1980s.
When Tony Mandarich in 1989 was followed by the Eagles’ infamous selection of Boston College defensive end Mike Mamula with the seventh overall pick 1995, teams swore they wouldn’t get carried away by what they saw in Indy. But like Charlie Brown lining up behind Lucy with her football, there’s a sucker seemingly every year.
“If anything, it might have gotten even worse,” an NFC personnel chief, and admitted workout-warrior victim, told The Post here yesterday. “The league puts so much emphasis on the combine now with the NFL Network that some teams get carried away. We’re only human.”
That exec wasn’t the only one to point to the combine’s incredible explosion in visibility just in the past few years for contributing to the ability of workout warriors to live on. Once a sleepy affair held behind closed doors with minimal media attention and thick veil of secrecy, the combine now has its on-field workouts shown live on the league’s own cable network. Results are now pored over like the Talmud by a media throng that numbered more than 300 last year.
Number of combine media credentials issued in 1992? Six.
Scouts also blame micromanaging head coaches for the persistence of workout warriors. Unable to watch much film of prospects during the season, those coaches still want to control the draft process and base too much of their decision on what they see or hear at the combine.
That’s not to say every player who blows away coaches and scouts here with a great workout is a bust. Dwight Freeney’s strong combine convinced the Colts to take him 11th overall in 2002 despite concerns about his size, and Logan Mankins made the Patriots look smart three years later when good numbers turned him into a surprise first-round pick.
But everyone seems to remember the busts more easily, which is why scouts will keep telling themselves to take what they see this week with a heaping grain of salt.
“You don’t want to be known as the guy who fell in love with Mamula,” the NFC exec said.