What Is Shrine Week? Much More Than Just Draft-Prospect Evaluation
The East-West Shrine Game is an annual college football tradition that has been cemented into the fabric of this country for nearly a century. Most of us are only familiar with the game that takes place this Saturday or the better-known players who will be participating in it.
However, this All-Star event is a weeklong process that helps to determine the NFL future for a countless number of hopefuls. Whether they make it to the NFL or not, every player will leave that experience with lifelong memories and newfound respect for unconventional acts of bravery.
Started back in 1925 by an appendant body to Freemasonry, the Shriners International is a group currently made up of over 300,000 members and is best known for the creation of the Shriners Hospitals for Children, which is a network of over 20 medical facilities around the country.
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It’s these hospitals and the children within it who make this week an experience that sticks with you for a lifetime. The idea of having an All-Star game was implemented to raise awareness and support for the hundreds and thousands of children who rely on the hospital to provide life-changing and often life-saving treatment.
The game itself is comprised of some of the top-recruited college athletes in football. For them, the week commences shortly after their college football season and bowl games conclude. The schedule is rigorous for these college kids turned NFL prospects and spans the course of an entire week.
Each year roughly 1,000 players from all over the country begin rigorous preparations for their quest to be in the NFL. Of those prospects, about 120 of will be named to the East-West Shrine Game roster.
I arrived with a naivety about the week that even now I’m reluctant to admit. With my body and mind battered and fatigued from a grueling senior season, coupled with the completion of finals at the University of California, I was hoping the week would be similar to the Pro Bowl in Hawaii. How wrong I was.
After checking into the hotel, the week kicks off with an orientation meeting that brings players from teams across the country under one roof. While organizers for the game lay out the schedule for the week and provide some idea about what to expect, players are steadily using the up-close encounter as a way to size each other up.
You have to understand in college we almost exclusively see our opponents hidden behind the distortion of football pads and a helmet, which tends to create a larger-than-life impression.
One of the themes that kept popping up throughout the week was having guys from the Pac-10 (was not the Pac-12 back then) tell me that I looked a lot bigger in pads. Former Oregon State quarterback Derek Anderson seemed to be the most surprised by how small I was considering I sacked him twice during our meeting and from him studying a ton tape of our defense.
Being told that I was smaller than people expected was not exactly the best thing for a defensive end prospect to hear. If my peers were surprised by my stature, there’s little doubt the scouts were underwhelmed as well.
One inauspicious formality to the orientation was the waiver which absolved the Shrine Game (and all known entities involved) from any liability for an injury. So, with an NFL career pending, participation throughout the week posed even more of an inherent risk that could potentially derail someone’s entire life’s work. This, without a doubt, put the fragility of our circumstance into perspective.
The whole week of evaluation from the scouts is really what I undervalued the most during my time at All-Star Week. During orientation we were told that NFL scouts would be watching everything we did on the field during practice, but I still didn’t really understand what that meant.
My approach toward practice was always about working on certain aspects of my craft while formulating a general attack strategy for the game. This is how I approached this particular week as well.
But it didn’t take long for me to realize that the practice intensity at the East-West Shrine Game was going to be a unique experience.
With NFL scouts littering the sidelines of our practice field, every warm-up, every coaching point, every cone or bag drill was executed with maximum effort and showmanship. Every player out there was looking to show off his technique, strength, power and ability to intimidate with every chance he got. Getting around a bag with a club move was not just about getting better at something—it was about showing the scouts what you could do.
This all may seem obvious today with the scouting combine and Senior Bowl practices now being televised, but back when I was participating, few guys really grasped the gravity of that week in terms of their NFL future.
Brief position meetings were held after practice inside small, stuffy conference rooms in the hotel. The coaching staff would focus on installing a limited set of plays in between jokes and nonsense. These meetings were lighthearted and set a misleading precedent throughout.
In the evenings, when practice and meetings were over, players would receive interview requests from the scouts.
One of my first interviews was with a middle-aged guy from the New England Patriots. Having grown up always wanting to be an NFL scout, I relished a chance to sit with one. Unfortunately, I ended up asking the guy every question I could about what it’s like to be a scout, how he got started, how much money scouts make and so on.
The scout was cordial and catered to my curiosities, but at the time it didn't occur to me I was likely demonstrating negative traits for an NFL prospect. My focus should have been more on the career opportunity as a player in that moment.
During the minimal downtime that was afforded to us, players were free to wander the hotel lobby or visit the nearby sites. This time of the day the hotel served as a strategic attack zone for would-be NFL agents looking to either break into the business or expand their client rosters with as many prospects as possible.
You could see players sitting around talking to agents in lounges and at various seating areas, listening to the carefully rehearsed pitches these guys had to offer.
This is where I met the two guys who would become my agents. That week they treated me to dinner in the lobby while they tried to fill me up with compliments. I called them out on it and suggested that we just get down to realistic expectations.
From there we set up a meeting in their hotel room, where one of them offered up a formal pitch that was rather convincing.
As mentioned earlier, one of the most rewarding events we took part in was visiting the children at the Shriners Hospital.
As dozens of college football players walked off the bus and through the doors of the facility, children of all ages were lined up eagerly awaiting for the chance to meet us. Seeing the excited looks and smiles on their faces was truly a special moment in my life.
You could see that many of these kids had been fighting an uphill battle with failing health. Being stripped of their childhood and forced to spend most of their days at the facility, oftentimes bedridden.
The day was filled with signing autographs and talking to these brave individuals who looked at us with so much admiration.
There were several moments throughout the day when emotions ran high for these players. It goes without saying that your heart goes out to these kids when you get to see them in the flesh and spend time with them. Their pain and struggles that constitute so much of their existence in that hospital were suspended temporarily and replaced with joy and excitement while the halls and rooms were overflowing with giant athletes wearing their Shrine Game jerseys.
I remember this experience putting my own struggles into perspective.
I was charged with a renewed strength and appreciation for my situation. The body aches and mental fatigue I had before I entered that hospital quickly faded.
Sure, my body was trampled and tired. The stresses of competition were mounting. But after visiting that hospital I was reminded of how blessed my situation was, and that if these kids could find their smiles amid unimaginable difficulties, then I should certainly rise above mine.
After that, the challenges of the week seemed to glide off my back, and the experience of the Shrine Game Week was absorbed the way it’s meant to be. Most of the participants of that game would never go on to thriving NFL careers. But what each would take with him from that week was a series of lifelong memories and accomplishments.
To be among the best college football players in the nation and to take part in a tradition that once featured the names of players like Gale Sayers, Tom Brady, John Elway, Brett Favre, Walter Payton, Roger Staubach, Dick Butkus, Alan Page and Pat Tillman was truly an honor worth appreciating.
The path to the NFL is far from easy, but few things along that arduous journey can teach you how to appreciate the wealth of memories that come with the whole process quite like Shrine Week can.
Ryan Riddle is a former NFL player who writes for Bleacher Report.
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