Silicon Valley companies and tech startups are known for asking job candidates weird questions during the interview process. For example, it is not uncommon for job seekers to be asked things like why a tennis ball is fuzzy or how the internet works as a way to get a better understanding of how someone thinks and if they're a good fit for the organization or not.
The NFL combine is pro football's version of a job interview, where players are measured for speed, strength and size, and for the last several years, some of them have been asked highly inappropriate questions to gain a better understanding of something else entirely.
For example, it takes a special kind of jerk to ask a college kid interviewing for a job if he's gay or if his mother's a prostitute.
Several NFL prospects have been asked these questions, as if they have anything to do with football. As if the answer to either of those questions has an effect on how fast a player can run or how high he can jump.
Eli Apple, Dez Bryant and Nick Casa have all been asked these questions. LSU running back Derrius Guice said this week he was asked by one NFL team if he was gay and by another if his mother is a prostitute at the combine last week, so we know that even though the practice is illegal, it persists.
Guice said they wanted to see how he responded to the shocking questions. So that means, in the NFL, gay is shocking and off-putting.
"It was pretty crazy," Guice said on the "Late Hits" Sirius XM show. "Some people are really trying to get in your head and test your reaction. ... I go in one room, and a team will ask me 'do I like men,' just to see my reaction. I go in another room, they'll try to bring up one of my family members or something and tell me, 'Hey, I heard your mom sells herself. How do you feel about that?' "
What would happen to his draft stock if he said, yes, his mother is a prostitute?
What about closeted football players going through the draft process, some of whom may be wrestling with suicide, as Ryan O'Callaghan was?
"It would have scared the s--- out of me," O'Callaghan, who came out as gay after playing in the NFL from 2006-2011, told Outsports this week. "I played football as a cover for being gay, and I thought that kind of stuff would have never gotten asked in the NFL. I always assumed the coaches would just assume everyone was straight."
O'Callaghan kept his sexuality a closely guarded secret during his NFL career. It would have been a mortifying experience to get a probing question about it during his combine experience.
"I would assume that they would have just been asking me because they knew something about me," he said. "I wasn't going to go around asking other guys if they got asked the same thing."
By the same token, another combine storyline this week was the curiosity some teams have about the humanitarian off-field pursuits of UCLA quarterback Josh Rosen. Because in the NFL, apparently you cannot have a care outside of football.
"He's coming back saying he loves football. I've talked to some people (who say he might like humanitarian work more than football," former NFL GM Michael Lombardi said this week. "I don't know. There's nothing wrong with that, but I don't know where his values really lie."
His values?
We're talking about a league that has accepted the values of sociopaths, abusers and killers as long as they're good enough to win games. If those values skew the other way, towards compassion and altruism, teams may not be as accepting?
It is more than ironic that Rosen's humanitarian interests might be an issue for teams, but the importance Carson Wentz places on religion and helping others who are less fortunate never once impacted his draft stock.
In the end, the questions being asked of NFL prospects tell us a lot more about the people asking them than those giving the answers.
And more and more, those questioners sure seem like jerks.
