This excerpt appears in the book Collision Low Crossers by Nicholas Dawidoff and is reprinted here with the permission of Little, Brown and Company. The author spoke with Bill Littlefield on Only A Game. (Listen to our interview with Dawidoff and read Bill's book review.)

COMBINE

He seems very strong. Did you notice his torso?

—Preston Sturges, Sullivan’s Travels

The year really began in the last days of February, at the NFL Scouting Combine in Indianapolis. The Scouting Combine is an annual invitation-only event at which more than three hundred of the country’s most promising draft-eligible college football players gather to audition for NFL teams by running, jumping, lifting weights, taking intelligence tests, and sitting down for private interviews, where each one might be asked about almost anything, including his injured shoulder,his bar brawl, his decision to save himself for marriage, and, as had happened the year before with the receiver Dez Bryant, whether his mother was a prostitute. When Eric Mangini led the Jets, he sometimes began a Combine interview by requiring the ten or so people in the room to introduce themselves to the player, after which the coach turned to the player and asked him to repeat all the names he’d just heard. This did not always go over well. LSU’s Dwayne Bowe, now a Chiefs receiver, believed Mangini was trying to humiliate him, and he shut down, producing a lengthy awkward moment that Jets officials still can’t recall without shuddering.

The Combine was a spectacle that had elements of other spectacles: it was a football screen