The Senior Bowl Weigh-In: A Beauty Pageant for Men

Nothing wakes you up at 8:30 in the morning like watching a hundred or so grown men parade around in their underwear in front of a room full of scouts and media members. This was my first time coming out to Mobile, Alabama, for the Senior Bowl, "the nation's most unique football game and football's premier senior showcase event," thoughtfully Brought To You by Reese's candy. This weigh-in is the week's first real event. Player after player stands as straight as he can while a scout on tiptoes measures his height against a panel; then he walks over to a scale to be weighed. A pair of scouts with a microphone announce each measurement, twice.

"It gets weirder every year," another media member confided to me.

Shawn Oakman, DE, Baylor 6 foot 7 and change, 269, not comp genned. — Michael Tanier (@MikeTanier)January 26, 2016

As evaluators of football talent, scouts like to think that the weigh-in matters for a number of reasons. For better or worse, some teams have decided that there are minimum physical thresholds for certain positions. The current Seahawks don't draft cornerbacks with arms less than 32 inches long, for example. (Those measurements—arm length, hand size—are taken and distributed to the room before players are paraded around like they're on the meat market.)

Scouts are always looking for bodies that are "maxed out," so to speak. The thinking goes that players who can't reasonably put on any more weight may not be able to withstand the punishment of the NFL. They're looking for players who teams listed with generous proportions in media guides: the 5-foot-10 guy—or, to use scout parlance, the 5103 (for that last ⅜ of an inch)—who had been reported at six feet even. The 210-pound player who becomes 235 and has the belly to prove it.

Most important—and this will become a theme this week—scouts are looking for the outliers: players that stick out like a sore thumb with their measurements, their play, or in interviews. The talent evaluators at the Senior Bowl are like water-heater repairmen tapping a wrench against the piping, just to see if anything sounds completely off.

NFL teams do this because hitting on draft picks, especially lower-round ones, is akin to finding an oasis in the desert. If you find a gem in the fourth round, you're not only adding another good player to your team; you're getting three to four years of solid production for peanuts, which in turn frees up more cap space to spend on above-average production elsewhere.

And so here we all are, watching football players get uncomfortably measured by scouts, listening to murmurs of "He has no ass" (and yes, the size of a man's ass actually can matter a lot in football), or trying to project body types. Utah's Jason Fanaika's torso is basically all legs—what does this mean for his future? How should we feel about that punter with the tattoo on his sternum?

You don't have to be the most fit man in the room to make a team—for every picture of the jarringly ripped Logan Thomas, there's that famous image of Tom Brady slumping in his underwear at the combine—but nobody at the weigh-in was wildly overweight, as in years past. Terrence Cody jokes will be fondly remembered by the die-hards in our audience, but that won't happen today. This event has gotten big enough that players are aware they need to leave the best impression possible.

There are things you can learn about players at weigh-in, things that will actually matter on the field. They are few and far between, but the grotesque lengths to which a NFL team will go to find that extra two percent should not shock anybody. After all, this is a league that hires private investigators to watch players talk in public. The weigh-in just crams all that creepiness into one room.

The NFL creates weird spectacles so often that it's practically become an operating philosophy—this is just the way they do things. Getting a chance to see it up close and personal, though—getting to witness the mood of the room shift because of a certain physical attribute—is enough to convince you that scouts really believe in this stuff. They consider it an important part of the process. That doesn't make it valid, but it is nevertheless clearly a reality.

For players, succeeding in the NFL means meeting such expectations over and over and over again. The Senior Bowl weigh-in is merely the first of many steps. If also possibly the strangest.