History loves to repeat itself, but not nearly as frequently as the NFL media.

With all due respect to my colleagues and peers, the NFL Scouting Combine provides a sterling example that there is truly nothing new under the sun, as it seems like every year provides the same lame lines of questioning as just about every year prior. Worse yet, many of the questions repeat themselves with almost every new prospect at the microphone.

Let me set the scene for you.

Over the next couple of days at the combine, NFL prospects will find themselves roused from slumber earlier than any human should actually awaken. For some, this will be just hours after they stayed up late meeting with teams, trainers or agents. They’ll then be taken to the inner corridors of Lucas Oil Stadium in chilly Indianapolis where doctors will poke, prod, test and take samples. After all that, these young men will be paraded in front of the media like the meat market the combine truly is.

The combine staff put lesser known players at a table where a few media members might show up. The big names get a podium and a larger crowd.

In most cases, this is all before the prospects are then expected to put their best feet forward in workouts. At best, there will be a handful of good questions and answers each day coming out of the interviews, but it’s become less of a time to get truly interesting feature pieces and more of an assembly line of horrid press conferences and groan-worthy lines of questioning.

Why does this happen?

With so many prospects coming in and out of the room on a daily basis, many of the media who cover NFL teams full time don’t have the ability (or desire) to do research on all of these prospects ahead of time. Whereas the best questions are always going to come from preparation. Most of the questions in this atmosphere are more like buckshot simply hoping to hit a target and make a worthwhile answer fall out of the sky.

Here are some of the worst questions prospects are sure to get asked and the stock answers they’re sure to give in response:

Can you talk about…

This is one of those things that will make 75 percent of the assembled media look around with an expression more befitting a foul release of methane into the room. Yet, as much as the journalistically inclined rant and rave about this lazy question construction, it never seems to stop it from happening in a room full of supposed professionals.

The issue with this question is that it puts all of the onus on the athlete to tell a story without giving him any real question to answer or point to drive home. The next time an athlete takes a question like this and actually runs with it in the way a reporter hopes will likely be the first.

Which teams have you met with?

This question takes the cake for me, because it’s asked repeatedly of prospects from the moment they declare themselves eligible for the draft until they throw a hat on and hug Roger Goodell. Local media and draft writers are apparently dying to know—at every step of the process—who is talking to who like a ridiculous extension of the middle school rumor mill.

It doesn’t matter.

It has never mattered.

It is a general truism that, by the end of the draft process, almost every team will talk to almost every draft eligible player. Maybe it’s just an area scout sidling up to a guy and grabbing his number to shoot him a text every now and then. Maybe it’s a full-on combine interview or an official visit. Maybe it’s a night out after a pro day we’ll never hear about.

The thing is: No matter how long or short the interview is…it doesn’t matter.

There is zero proof of any correlation between a team talking to a player at the combine and them drafting him. It’s logical that there might be, but when one considers the tremendous amount of work that goes into the process and all of the information being gathered, it begins to make sense why it doesn’t and why it never will.

Instead, every year we get fans and media into a frenzy as we try to connect the dots between teams and players, when the reality is more like a Jackson Pollack painting.

The General Interest Questions

These are stock questions that get asked of most prospects…sometimes by the same member of the media almost every time.

Who is your agent?

Who are you training with?

What are you planning on running?

Are you going to do all of the drills?

When is your pro day?

While I admit to falling into some of these before, these are all questions that don’t need to be asked of a kid up at a podium. You see the first one, on who the agent is? Yeah, that kind of information is stockpiled by the NFLPA on a website every single member of the NFL media has access to. It literally takes less time to look it up on the internet than it takes to ask the question and write down the name.

With that information in hand, things like training sites and pro day times are all easily accessible and this is just wasting everyone’s time when, you know, some in the media might actually have good questions that they prepared in advance.

Would you rather play/get drafted by…?

Finally, there’s the futile attempt each and every year to get players to hurt their own stock by picking a team they’d like to play for or a singular role that versatile players would rather play. Because, you know, teams just love a guy they have pegged for potential as an outside linebacker saying he wants to play end at the next level or a guy who says he hopes to get drafted by their division rival.

It’s actually kind of cruel when you think about.

The media is attempting a gotcha question here—a headline they can use at the expense of a player foolishly hurting his own chances by shrinking the pool of teams that might want him. That makes it less of a silly question, I suppose, and more of a slew of adjectives I don’t think I can type in this space.

Moreover, it’s useless for the same reason a lot of these stock questions are: Agents know these questions are coming and prepare their clients to give stock answers. Almost every top pick has been drilled on how to give the blandest non-answers possible, so they don’t hurt themselves, and that’s a good thing.

Let’s be clear: This is not every member of the media. No, as much as Marshawn Lynch and Kevin Durant try to paint every single person holding a voice recorder as the enemy, there are plenty of hard-working, industrious and innovative people who will be asking awesome questions with plenty of foresight and preparation.

The problem isn’t that those good questions don’t exist, but that they get lost in the din of too many asking the stupid stuff because they feel compelled to ask something rather than let a player walk off the stage.

So what’s the solution?

We have to get past the point where we think the answers to these questions matter and to a place where we’re interested in the persons at the podium rather than simply the list of factoids and canned responses they can give us.

Even more importantly, we have to be willing to admit that we just aren’t that into some of these young men because they are unknowns. Maybe that seems harsher than it is, but should a beat reporter from [insert NFL city here] really pretend to care about a likely free agent just on the off-chance he might end up covering him?

We’re at the point where the combine is quickly becoming the annoying little brother in a family where Super Bowl media day is the annoying big brother. It’s a mish-mash of assembled media, often from the periphery of actually covering the event in any real way that is too often content with the lowest common denominator.

We can be better than this.