It’s that time of year again. Just as we thought football season was ready to give way to the start of baseball season, it pushed its way back into the spotlight. The NFL Combine is a four-day circus of drills, medical tests, interviews and then more drills. Fans watch in awe as players run a 40-yard dash in 4.3 seconds or bench press an ungodly amount of weight, but what are the NFL team scouts and general managers watching?

In reality, teams can get almost any information that they want just from watching film from a player’s college games. With that being said, one might ask why players need to do so many drills in the first place? The answer is that it’s not about physical toughness, but mental toughness. Teams want to see what players can make it through the weekend without cracking under the stress of hours of medical examinations early in the morning leading right into hours of drills and intensive interviews.

Speaking of interviews, this is the behind the scenes part of the combine that can make or break when a player will be drafted. Teams get down to business and ask the tough questions in order to find out about a player’s family, their past and any other uncomfortable topics that simply cannot go unspoken. Dallas Cowboys wide receiver Dez Bryant was openly critical of a team that was interviewing him during the combine and asked if his mother was a prostitute and used drugs, based on past jail time she had served for dealing crack cocaine.

While questions like this may seem out of bounds, it is important for a team to know what kind of trouble a player could get involved in whether they are dragged in or get involved intentionally.

I am certainly not saying that a player's physical attributes do not matter, but let’s be real, having players walk out and stand around without their shirts on for teams to look at them (players call this part “the meat market”) just isn’t necessary. It is the parts of the combine that we don’t see on TV that can make the biggest difference on draft day.