More important to an NFL prospect: Understanding complex defensive schemes or an Oedipal complex?
In the pantheon of crazy NFL Scouting Combine questions arises “Do you find your mother attractive?,” which has surfaced again this year after a former NFL player reported he was asked the same thing in 2010.
Dana Brugler of CBS Sports highlighted the hot-for-mom question as the strangest one he’s heard so far at the Combine, after Austen Lane, a former defensive end with Jacksonville, Detroit and Chicago, said he was asked it when he was just out of Murray State.
The questions at the combine, in which players are put through the physical ringer and measured athletically in every way conceivable, are as prying as they are silly. Teams try to learn as much about their potential investment as they can — without any question filter, apparently.
The combine questions have taken on a sort of mythology, as intrusive teams conduct their own psychoanalysis of players before the NFL Draft. A football team of 53 players from different backgrounds, whose success is hinged upon the meshing of these personalities, wants to find players who can help on and off the field.
How they do this investigating, though, is either hilarious or infuriating, depending upon the question’s target. Cowboys receiver Dez Bryant was infamously asked if his mother was ever a prostitute.
Questions that have been passed around this year are not quite as biting, but just as bizarre.
The inanity even started a hashtag: #Combinequestions.