Off Topic: When you run out of interview questions

Time for my semi-regular 'I have not done a sports post in a while, and I need to make sure the 2013 of The 8 Man Rotation E-book will have lots of SFB content.  Did you catch that, Matt 'akaBruno' Stollak? 

Any by the way, please congratulate The Professor and his family on the recent birth of twins - Mia and Micah!

Back to the point - or what will pass for a point on a Friday.

Book, can, drum, mirror, door. (I will come back to this later, but try and remember this list).

Recently, the National Football League, (where they play....... for pay), conducted its annual Scouting Combine - a several day long series of events, interviews, feats of speed and strength, etc. designed to give its member clubs a chance to assess and evaluate lots and lots of potential draftees, (job candidates), in one place, and under consistent and controlled conditions.Gary Hume, Girl Boy, Boy Girl

The hopeful candidates run 40 yard dashes, do the broad jump, perform bench presses, and in addition to these physical tests, (again, which provide a really solid way to compare the performance of players), also undergo some mental and cognitive assessments, (most notably the Wonderlic test).

But having the same information as all your competitors, (40 times, bench presses, etc.) doesn't really help a team gain a recruiting advantage - none of the information is powerful since it is completely open and free. For a team trying to decide which players to draft - they need to get past the size and speed and test scores, and really get some unique insight into the player. What motivates him, does he have passion for the sport, is he likely to be a 'good' teammate, and not be a 'me-first' prima donna.

And if you are the Cincinnati Bengals, you also want to know if the player can remember five random words in order. 

Check this excerpt from a recent piece on Deadspin, on the Combine experience of draft hopeful Lane Johnson - 

"One thing caught me off guard. I was meeting with Cincinnati, and I went in there and they told me to remember five things. They just listed five things like a bear, a flower, a tree, a man and like a dog. And they told me to remember those terms, at the end of the meeting to see if I could remember them. And from that point on, they listed numbers. They said, like, 9167, and then told me to repeat them in reverse order. So that was probably the weirdest meeting I've ever been a part of."

Nice. And classic Bengals in a way as well.

Now there could be some real validity in asking a question like this - a check on a player's concentration, their short-term memory, ability to pay attention to instructions, etc. that might have some validity and value in the assessment process. Maybe the performance on a question like this is highly predictive of future success as an NFL player. 

Or maybe it's just a random question, full of weirdness and confusion, signifying nothing. But if you do find yourself at a loss for any more clever interview questions the next time you have a candidate in for a chat maybe you can try it out and see what happens.

Remember the five things?