When it comes to constructing a draft board, March and April are red-flag months.
The flags go up, and player names come down.
Flags for character issues, everything from work ethic in the classroom to attitude in a face-to-face interview to arrests, drug tests and nights in jail.
Sometimes prospects have reasons for what happened, explanations about what they would do in the future to prevent the incidents from happening again, and sometimes they do not.
The teams simply have to decide if they can figure out what’s going on inside a prospect’s head and if he’s worth the risk of an NFL-sized salary.
Then there are injury flags. And there may be no more helpless feeling for a prospect than an injury flag.
A guy didn’t ask to have his leg bent in such a way that his anterior cruciate ligament (ACL) exploded. A guy doesn’t ask for fractures, pins and steel plates.
But football is a game in which such things will happen. How does a player overcome those questions?
“I’m not sure,” Colorado defensive back Travis Sandersfeld said. “I wish I knew. I guess you just try to show them you’re healthy now. Sometimes it’s just bad luck, you know. All I can do is hope one team can see past what’s happened or at least see it for what it was, just bad luck.”
Sandersfeld raised plenty of eyebrows at CU’s pro day with his athleticism. He showed speed and explosiveness, two of the biggest bricks in the foundation for an NFL career.
But Sandersfeld also missed most of two seasons because of leg fractures.
Which is why plenty of the decisions teams make end up, at least in many ways, in the hands of doctors.
John Elway said he didn’t go to one of the predraft combines in 1983 because he “didn’t want anybody to see my knee.”
Not an option these days as the majority of the prospects have been X-rayed, poked, prodded and had their medical records dating to shots for whooping cough distributed to every team in the league. Teams try to decide if a player has been predisposed to injuries in some way or if they were simply a product of a physical game.
They try to gauge recovery and where the prospect will fit. That old “good as new” thing is a myth, really.
A player can regain strength, speed and flexibility, sometimes even improve them, with vigorous rehab and a quality surgical staff, but things are never like new. It becomes a matter of fixing and repairing for the job at hand.
Even for a player like Peyton Manning, with a Hall of Fame résumé, trying to convince folks he can nudge right up to good-as-new as he returns from cervical fusion surgery.
In another case, Elway played his entire NFL career on a knee he didn’t want anybody to see and with an odd-shaped biceps in his throwing arm.
“Say, in a case like Peyton Manning, even if your strength wasn’t there, but you could throw the ball really nicely, it really may not matter the strength isn’t there per se,” said Dr. Eric McCarty, director of sports medicine at the University of Colorado Anschutz Medical Campus.
“I’ve seen athletes who have gone out to play after an injury and for what they’ve needed to do they’ve been able to do, so functionally they were able to perform at a very high level. But if you tested their strength in a particular aspect, they might have a little weakness there. It’s the whole picture.”
Jeff Legwold: 303-954-2359 or jlegwold@denverpost.com
