Forget the glitz and glamor of TV, the real value of the NFL Scouting Combine is stuff most of us never see.

As the popularity of the NFL Draft marches on and on to become a big-time event not only on the NFL schedule but in all of sports, it has necessitated a peek behind the scenes at events that were never meant for entertainment value. Like the Shrine Game, Senior Bowl and pro days, the NFL started holding the Scouting Combine years ago and never imagined it would ever be televised.

Because of that, the hoopla surrounding the combine has almost shoehorned value into the event for viewers masking much of the actual importance of the event.

Almost without fail, the things teams will find most important in Indianapolis this week aren’t what the cameras are focused on or what the NFL Network commentators are talking about.

About Those Workouts

No one cares about your 40 time…

Let’s make sure we draw some nuance here. Though the NFL is notoriously stuck in their ways and longtime football types are often drawn to the illogical allure of “but that’s how we’ve always done it,” even they wouldn’t have players line up and run 40 yards if they didn’t find value in it.

To be clear: the NFL wants every prospect to run the 40-yard-dash, but the final time doesn’t mean what you think it means.

With the possible exception of the Oakland Raiders under Al Davis, no one is drafting a player solely on their 40 time. Frankly, the chart of “official times” you see published are completely garbage as no team trusts anything but their guy at the finish line, usually with the same stopwatch he’s been using for years.

Teams want to see players who have natural athleticism and look comfortable doing athletic things like running the 40-yard dash. They also want to see players who have diligently trained for the event—like a job applicant who wears a sport coat to an interview for a job where he’ll never have to wear one again.

We’re conditioned to think the time matters.

The time doesn’t really matter.

Much of the same can be said about every other general workout and position-specific drill at the combine. We are conditioned to focus on the “winners” of each event, but that’s something teams couldn’t care less about.

A general combine maxim is that you never credit a player twice for the same thing. If you saw strength on the field, you don’t give him credit for doing well on the bench press. If you saw agility on the field, it doesn’t matter that he blew up the three-cone drill.

Teams are there to see players from vastly different levels of competition on an even playing field, side-by-side with the peers. Scouts will take pages and pages of notes and will pour over tapes of the workouts long after the bright lights of Lucas Oil Stadium have been shut off. These things have value, just not the value the media focuses on.

The one thing I can promise they’ll never (ever) do is have a list of all the combine winners and losers in the war room in April.

We’ll Never See the Most Important Parts of the Combine

While all the cameras are trained on the field, the real reasons teams value the combine can be found deep in the bowels of the stadium or in the upper levels of the hotel.

You see: the draft has become big business for the NFL. It’s a multi-billion dollar operation with a serious retention problem. The most cost-effective way to fix that issue is the draft which supplies a large quantity of cheap labor every single year.

Yet, even a cheap investment is an investment, and things like roster-size limits and salary caps mean that these investments can’t be made without plenty of research. So, teams couch their decision-making processes with all of the information they can find, which includes finding out all they can about players through regional scouts that are one-part football guys, one-part private investigators.

At the combine, it’s time to pay the piper, because there will be no more secrets.

Before a player ever works out, he undergoes a rigorous physical process which includes a full range of drug testing. If a player has injury red flags in his past, doctors will poke and prod until every team’s questions have been fully answered.

It’s even possible for players to find out about previously unknown medical issues at the combine where “soreness” becomes a stress fracture or “oh, it’s nothing” becomes a heart murmur. While it stinks to think of a player’s career ending under those circumstances, it’s also saved some lives.

Teams also use the centralized location of the combine to get to know players in a much more formal way than previously done. Sure the local scout probably has shook hands with the top guys in his area and maybe even grabbed his digits at the Senior Bowl to keep in touch with his training, but this is the big time with the coach, general manager and a handful of other guys in the room grilling a guy about issues on and off the field.

“Which teams have you met with?”

That question is asked of every prospect by some poor rube in the media who is just playing his part. “So-and-so met with the blankety-blanks” becomes a headline in that city and fans grasp onto it as if it means something. Really, it doesn’t, as every team will meet with just about every player in some way, shape or form throughout the process.

No, just like the workouts, the basic fact of the meeting doesn’t matter, but the true value is found in what the teams take away from the meeting.

Was a player rattled by our line of questioning?

Did he seem nervous?

Does he seem comfortable with our scheme?

Does he take direction well?

Teams play games with this just like Fortune 500 companies find ways to test applicants in ways they’re not even expecting. A player will walk in to one room expecting to be grilled about an off-the-field incident and the team might never ask him about it. Instead, they wait to see if he’ll bring it up. Then, in the very next room, the defensive line coach of another team spends five minutes two inches from the players face asking how he could be so stupid.

One of my favorite combine interview stories involves a first-round talent who had left school as a junior. Although he had spent the entire draft process expecting to be highly valued by a certain team based on his fit in their scheme, the first question he was asked upon entering the interview was about his plans to finish his degree. When he didn’t have any, the team didn’t really have any more questions for him.

They certainly didn’t have any interest in drafting him.

These are important pieces of the combine that have incredible value for teams, but will simply never be accessible for the common fan outside of second-hand stories told long after the fact. They are the reasons teams pack up almost their entire organization to head to Indianapolis, because they could never access these things through the TV cameras.