THE NFL DRAFT, THE DEBATES, JOE BURROW AND NINE INCH HANDS

The NFL Draft is a lot like an election, albeit with a voting base even more restricted than Georgia’s, especially if you think of quarterbacks as the top-of-the-ticket presidential candidates. Those quarterbacks spend four months building up their resumes and turning themselves into stars. Then, after the Super Bowl, with little else to focus on, the tables get turned. Only those who’ve crossed a certain threshold in the scouting ‘polls’ get to enter the th great talent show that is the Combine, not even if, like Michael Bloomberg, you were to offer $60 billion as collateral. The Combine thus becomes the equivalent of the campaign ‘debates’.

Like presidential ‘debaters’, the players at the combine will face examination and grilling from general managers,coaches and scouts who, like a gaggle of Beltway Chuck Todds, mostly follow the same mainstream script they’ve followed at every combine. The script is designed to somehow squeeze square-peg quarterbacks with individual characteristics, who have succeeded within systems often unique and sometimes antithetical to the mainstream paradigm for NFL offenses, into the round holes of the classic NFL dropback passer, possessed of size to see over the pass rush, arm-strength to throw over a cross bar from the knees at 60 yards, leap over tall buildings in a single bound and with hands big enough to…