NFL Combine 2012: From Fozzy and Dre to RG III, Luck's Got Nothing to Do with It

Combine week!

The one week a year when it's okay for one man to say about another, "He's got really fluid hips and tremendous length, I'd love to see his Wonderlic."

As the football world descends on Indianapolis this week for the annual poking, prodding, running, jumping and psycho-analyzing jamboree that's known as the NFL Scouting Combine, draft analysts everywhere are ready to move players up and down their rating charts at the blink of a forty time.

And while the marquee player in this year's combine, Andrew Luck, won't have the pressure of improving his draft stock to worry about, he'll still be at the center of attention in the town that both he and the Colts hope he calls home for the next 15 years or so.

Unlike Luck, the other 300 or so players will arrive in Indianapolis with hopes of impressing the gathered scouts, GMs and coaches with not only their running and lifting prowess but also with their mental makeup, which will be dissected thoroughly through interviews and the ever popular Wonderlic test.

The players will all arrive at Lucas Oil Stadium with varying hopes, from improving their draft stock, getting face time with prospective employers and maybe even getting the NFL Network's Mike Mayock to say something nice about them.

With rough beginnings that go all the way back to 1977, the NFL Scouting Combine has blossomed into a football fan's nirvana, a full week in the dead of winter of getting a look behind the curtain at some of the key machinations that go into the draft process.

It's a funny business, this NFL Combine. You'd think that three years of tape (or DVD, or DragonFly or whatever the latest and greatest viewing technology is) would be enough of an illustration to show pro teams who they might want on their teams.

The Combine is far from a perfect process and it doesn't pretend to be. Indeed, two or three years of watching tape of players, you know, actually playing football is still the most important part of the process.

What they do in Indianapolis each year is sort of like a second or third interview in the real world. Coaches, scouts and front office folk love getting the chance to see prospects up close and personal, and though sometimes right and sometimes wrong, many final decisions on a player's stock happen here. What happens in Indy certainly doesn't stay in Indy. Just ask Andre Smith (pictured).

Teams go back to their offices and crunch the numbers and analyze the interviews and adjust their draft boards accordingly. Two or three tenths of a second either way can raise or lower a player's value a round or two, and a bad interview can completely remove a player from a team's plans.

However, for every Combine story of a player moving up drastically (Chris Johnson's 4.24 time vaulted him from a mid-rounder to the 24th pick), there seems to be five stories of "workout warriors" who fail to come through on the field (Mike Mamula, Troy Williamson, Darrius Heyward-Bey).

In the end, it's still a far from exact science. Two players can come to the Combine with very similar college production and very similar rankings, and when they leave, there is usually some separation. In 1990 two of college football's best and most productive running backs showed up ranked fairly even. One ran a 4.4 and the other ran a 4.7. Two months later Blair Thomas was drafted second while Emmitt Smith fell to 17th.

You know the rest. Enjoy the Combine.