Stats don’t always tell the whole story in a football game. Likewise, a football player’s GPA doesn’t always measure how much he learned in college, or whether he’ll become a liability to a pro organization.
But it could determine if a player can participate in the NFL Combine. Bruce Feldman of CBSSports reports, citing a league source, reports that NFL is considering not inviting players who are academically ineligible in college to the Combine. The idea is being discussed in response to “increased scrutiny on the maturity and commitment of the prospects entering the NFL.”
Next, prospects will be required to wear 37 pieces of flair instead of 13.
Piggybacking on what PFT wrote, while the idea seems noble on the surface, there’s not much substance to it underneath. College football isn’t as much a “farm system” for the pros as it is a weeding out process, but the NFL nevertheless benefits from outsourcing its minor league system.
To suddenly put an extra emphasis on academics in college when football performance matters most to NFL clubs is only going to make things harder. The scouting combine is a money saver for pro organizations and academically ineligible players will be drafted anyways. On top of that, to correlate grades with the maturity needed to be a valuable member of an organization has a Band Aid-head wound type feel to it.
And just imagine the increase in academic fraud to make sure an athlete is eligible for the biggest event that determines his future career. Let’s say a prospect makes the grade to be eligible for the combine, but is later found to have committed academic fraud, along with his school, in the process. Does Roger Goodell do anything? Is it even punishable? If so, how? It’s certainly not a lesson to be learned by that point in the player’s career, or the team for which he plays.
The sweet irony of the idea is that it’s supposed to help NFL teams, when in fact it would do nothing of the sort; rather, it would only serve as another PR campaign for college programs so they could point to the number of football players “successful” on and off the field. It would be like the APR except even more meaningless and with the added bonus of being easily falsified.
But, most importantly, requiring players to be academically eligible for the combine won’t do what it’s supposedly intended to do: reduce bad apples. Players won’t strive for greatness in their lives because a minimum academic bar has been set. If anything, they’ll strive for that bar and that bar only, and use whatever means necessary, good or bad, to get past the detraction.
NFL clubs do plenty of scouting and due diligence as it is. There’s no need to add in a requirement that doesn’t matter to teams anyway.
