The run-up to the NFL draft features the annual anonymous pillorying of select college prospects by NFL scouts, who are long overdue for their own time beneath the merciless eye of the scouting report.
Todd McShay: Just as good or bad as Mel Kiper, statistically speaking. Narrowest shoulders I've ever seen on a human being ever. I base this on seeing him ahead of me on the same flight out of Atlanta once. McShay might be twenty inches across at the shoulder, slight enough to wear a Betsey Johnson evening dress with ease, and slim enough to deliver beneath a door like an unwanted flyer reading "I had Jimmy Clausen as the fourth pick in the NFL Draft." He has the beautiful slender fingers of a freshly manicured elf.
Sources tell us: McShay has not eaten a solid meal in years, is confused about what constitutes "food." His desk is kept clean, as any object in arm's reach is considered a choking hazard.
Nolan Nawrocki: A former linebacker for Illinois, and therefore like many scouts has never played football. Projects to middle linebacker due to his talent for funneling coded racist traffic from scouts through the A gap and into his reports. An attention to detail as seen here:
Excessively sweats and has needed IV’s at times to control condition.
Sources tell us: Nawrocki still writes his scouting reports in Microsoft Word.
Russ Lande: Still working the haircut that made New Jersey great in 1992. A safe, checkdown kind of pundit who won't overreach. The Brad Johnson of draftniks. I know he is careful, judicious, and studious as a scout because I sat behind him at the NFL draft one year and watched him eat a sandwich. He worked his way thoughtfully through it while working, one steady bite at a time. No glory boy behavior or ill-advised shots down field. He moved the chains on that sandwich, and that's all you can ask of a pro in a man's league.
Sources tell us: he once reduced Dick Vermeil to tears with a scouting report on the French silent classic L'Atalante.
Mike Mayock.Ass-obsessed human Adderall drip. Unparalleled endurance and length (via word count on conference calls.) Unquestioned toughness (via enduring every dreadful NFL Thursday Night Game as color commentator.) Sizeist philistine (via not accepting unconventional body types and embracing different, non-hurtful standards of beauty.)
Sources tell us: Mike Mayock is not a miserable human being and covers the NFL draft for a living, so therefore has to have some kind of hidden character issues.
Gil Brandt: Veteran draftnik who built decades worth of Cowboys teams under Tom Landry. At eighty, is probably too old to be a four down player, but never underestimate a carefully administered dose of old man strength applied at the right point. Cannot bench due to "an ice fishin' shoulder." His manner is Wisconsin grandfatherly; his metaphors, fruity.
Incidentally, that seems to be a trend in this draft class; I haven't run into any bad apples yet.
Also:
Ziggy Ansah is 1 of top physical specimens I've ever seen. Size of 1 finger as big as normal person's 2 fingers. Top 5? I'd take him at 2
— Gil Brandt (@Gil_Brandt) April 24, 2013
EDIT: May really overrate importance of giant freaky thick cactus trunk fingers.
Sources tell us: Held a position of power in the state of Texas for almost thirty years, so he probably totally killed someone.
Mel Kiper. The delicate, diaphanously white ankles of your grandmother. A pioneer at the position. Hardworking; years in the film room have left him devoid of pigment. Contact with direct sunlight will turn him into forty-two pounds of ashes topped by an adamantine black helmet of shellacked hair. Is incapable of pronouncing the word "strength," and has an abysmal hang clean. May actually hate Todd McShay, and thus unlike McShay is human and capable of real emotion because hate counts, too.
Sources tell us: All Kipers reproduce by spores.
Clean all surfaces following a Kiper appearance or risk an infestation.