For at least one NFL team, pre-draft interviews resemble criminal interrogations, according to two players who have been exposed to the process.
Top wide receiver prospect Mike Williams, fresh off a national championship win with Clemson, shared the cringeworthy story of a fellow prospect who, most recently, faced a team’s question about murder.
“You get some weird questions,” Williams said Tuesday on “The Rich Eisen Show.”
“I mean, I heard somebody, somebody I know, got a question like, ‘How would you kill somebody? Would you use a gun or a knife?’”
What comes off as a singularly strange case actually indicates a bizarre trend. During the weeks leading up to last year’s draft, former LSU cornerback Jalen Mills spoke of the very same encounter with an anonymous team.
Mills, now with the Eagles, singled out the “gun” as the better answer because, if the NFL team is evaluating your moral compass, picking the “knife” suggests you would have no problem “killing for fun because you have to continuously stab someone,” he told CBS Sports last March.
Yes, football is a violent sport, but why should a player who’s most concerned with carrying a ball into an end zone consider life as a killer? It’s all part of the pre-draft process, in which teams go to extreme lengths to find out a player’s mindset, so desperate to gamble on the right person.
Eli Apple, now with the Giants, was asked by a Falcons evaluator if he liked men in his pre-draft meeting.
“It was like the first thing he asked me,” Apple told CSN Philadelphia last year. “It was weird. I was just like, ‘No.’ He was like, ‘If you’re going to come to Atlanta, sometimes that’s how it is around here, you’re going to have to get used to it.’ I guess he was joking, but they just ask most of these questions to see how you’re going to react.”
Falcons coach Dan Quinn later apologized for his staff’s “inappropriate and unprofessional” conduct.