The NFL Draft Combine can make an NFL prospect a lot of money and it can shatter his dreams. It’s not just about his 40-yard dash time or his level of arm strength.
Coaches want to get to know players inside and out, which can often lead to odd and uncomfortable situations. Central Florida quarterback Blake Bortles, a first round hopeful, is the latest example.
Bortles handled a handful of questions at the recently completed Combine about model girlfriend Lindsey Duke, an Internet sensation.
“’If we come to town, will she be there for dinner,’ and stuff like that,” Bortles said Wednesday on “The Dan Patrick Show.” “[The teams] knew [about my girlfriend] going into the meeting. I think that was kinda the angle, how I would react to it.”
Bortles is part of a not-so-exclusive club of publicized and uncomfortable meetings that players have had with teams. Below are a few others:
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In the lead-up to the 2010 Draft, wide receiver Dez Bryant was asked by former Dolphins general manager Jeff Ireland if his mother, Angela, was a prostitute. She gave birth to Bryant when she was 15 and conceived his younger sister and brother over the next three years. She reportedly sold drugs and served a prison sentence during Bryant’s childhood.
“I got mad – really mad – but I didn’t show it,” Bryant, who was selected by the Cowboys with the 24th pick of the first round, told Yahoo! Sports. “I got a lot of questions like that: Does she still do drugs? I sat and answered all of them.”
Ireland later apologized to Bryant for the question.
During the 2010 NFL Combine, defensive tackle Gerald McCoy said he was asked by the Buccaneers if he wore a g-string or a jock strap when he played. McCoy didn’t reveal his answer, but the Bucs must have liked the response because Tampa Bay tabbed him as the Draft’s third overall pick.
Prior to last year’s Draft, offensive tackle Lane Johnson met with the Bengals and was caught off guard by their non-traditional line of questioning.
“I was meeting with Cincinnati, and I went in there and they told me to remember five things,” Johnson recalled in an interview with Darren Smith on The Mighty 1090 in San Diego. “They just listed like five things — a bear, a flower, a tree, a man and like a dog — and they told me to remember those terms at the end of the meeting to see if I could remember them. And from that point on, they listed numbers. They said, like, ‘9167,’ and told me to repeat them in reverse order. So that was probably the weirdest meeting I’ve ever been a part of and kind of caught me off guard.
“I would definitely say I was prepared except for that meeting,” he added.
Johnson did say he thinks he got four out of the five correct.
“It was definitely challenging because it caught you off guard,” he said.
Johnson was taken by the Eagles with the fourth selection of the first round.