A Look at Race and the NFL Scouting Combine
The National Football League’s National Scouting Combine operates like this: Over a four-day period, NFL scouts get the chance to gauge the skills of the year’s top approximately 300 or so draft picks among college players. Scouts are allowed to evaluate the young players, who attend by invitation only, on a full range of criteria that encompass mental health as well as physical condition. The goal: to build the most effective pro team possible.
Back in the 1970s, pro teams usually weren’t focused on making potential recruits undergo intensive physical examinations. Hoping to reduce the chances they’d make a “mistake,” the New York Jets broke with that practice mid-decade, asking the college seniors they interviewed to get thorough physicals focused on orthopedic fitness. Additionally, the potential draft picks had to go through in-person interviews. Which brings us to today.
In addition to setting the future course of the teams of the NFL, the Combine is eagerly anticipated by fans and sports media, abuzz with gossip about the fate of each player.
Combine equals slave block?
The young players are measured and tested, undergoing a series of workouts and physical fitness drills designed to determine how strong, fast, and agile they would be on a real football field. The major portions of the evaluation encompass a broad jump, bench press, shuttle run, vertical jump, and 40-yard sprint.
According to Colin Kaepernick, the sight of so many young Black men being so evaluated—usually by white men—conjures up images of the slave auction block.
Kaepernick isn’t the first to think so. But he’s the latest to draw controversy.
In the Netflix documentary series on his life, Colin in Black & White, Kaepernick described how exposed these players hoping to make it to the pros feel. How, in front of groups of scouts, coaches, and executives, they endure a host of often-invasive tests of their physical strength, mental acuity, and toughness.
In the documentary, Kaepernick says that representatives of the team owners—a loaded word in this context—tell the potential recruits that they want to find “warriors, killers, beasts.” He says that what all these people hope the young players won’t find out is that there’s a “power dynamic” being solidified right there.
As Kaepernick puts it, they “poke, prod, and examine you,” looking for anything that could detract from later on-the-field ability.
Scouting teams are also looking to gauge a player’s intelligence and personality, in the process asking what Kap describes as “inappropriate questions.” Boundaries, respect, and personal dignity go out the window as the young players are treated, for all intents and purposes, like livestock.
The blowback
Predictably, Kaepernick’s comments drew criticism from some NFL officials and players. The general line of criticism was that the Combine is set up specifically to evaluate potential draft picks, on whom teams will be spending millions of dollars, to judge their fitness to do the job for which they’re being considered. Players who pass the tests can earn life-changing amounts of money in salaries and endorsements.
Former New York Jets and Oakland Raiders player Burgess Owens, elected as a Republican to the United States House of Representatives from Utah’s 4th District in 2020, lit into Kap on Twitter, writing that he should never have compared the “evil endured” by their enslaved ancestors to the situation in which “a bunch of millionaires” have decided to put their abilities and physical fitness on the line to play a game.
Journalist Touré wrote an op-ed vehemently disagreeing with Kap’s take. Noting that comparing today’s American prison system to slavery is indeed valid, Touré said that the argument that players making the “enthusiastic choice” to participate in the Combine are living through a similar experience is “intellectually bankrupt.”
A nuanced understanding of power
The always-insightful Ava DuVernay, the filmmaker behind Colin in Black & White, had this to say on the controversy: The point isn’t the lucrative potential available to a professional football player, it’s about the “social control of a Black body.”
In the documentary, she says, Kaepernick is describing what it felt like for him, as a Black man, to undergo the measurement and judgment of his physical being in a white-dominated environment.
Regardless of the fact that we’re not talking about the horrors of literal slavery here, this is an important point: Sociologists who describe power dynamics have long noted that those who hold the power in any encounter among human beings are tacitly accorded the prerogative to set the tone, make the rules, and even invade the personal space of others if it suits their purposes.
Keep it or let it go? Players’ voices may be key
So should we do away with the Combine altogether? There’s a case to be made for that, but there’s also room for reform. In February 2022, Combine officials announced they’d be relaxing the “bubble” in which they had originally required potential draft picks to remain for the entire four days.
The March 2022 Combine ended up allowing players in the draft pool to leave the secured areas of the Combine during their free time, and their chosen medical and training teams were allowed to enter the secured area to work with them. This increased freedom of movement is a welcome change. But it didn’t happen in a vacuum. It was in response to threats of a mass boycott from players and agents, who argued that access to their own teams of coaches and trainers is vital.
Here’s where we might have a solution: If players, agents, and fans who want to see greater fairness leverage strength in numbers to publicly call out the echoes of slave auctions and other indignities built into the Combine, they might be able to use the controversy to gain a better negotiating position. It might come down either to that, or to all of us continuing to enable power games reminiscent of a bygone day.