CFL prospects must ace interviews

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 28/02/2012 (5208 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Two days from now, 59 Canadian athletes, draft eligible and professional football hopefuls, will converge on the indoor facilities at the University of Toronto to display their gridiron wares in front of CFL coaches and general managers.

You can be assured that for some time now, these invitees have been working on their testing measureables like the 40-yard dash, vertical and broad jumps, bench press and lateral movement drills. Yet, as the game of football has evolved, so has the emphasis on different parameters of evaluation.

The one thing you can count on as a player at an evaluation camp is everybody thinks they know a heck of a lot more than they actually do, as the science behind testing is far from exact. The NFL, which goes as far back as to talk to a player’s high school coach for their draft research, consistently elevates some players with their methodologies and buries others as a result of the shortcomings of their tests. How else do you explain the fact the New England Patriots had 18 players deemed unworthy of being drafted on their Super Bowl roster? That’s an astounding 34 per cent of their entire 53-man active squad.

You can’t test a player’s love for the game of football by how many times he can bench press 225 pounds. You can’t determine how hard he will work to improve based off of his sit and reach flexibility test or his intestinal fortitude from measuring his vertical and broad jumps. Which is probably why now, 15 years after my first evaluation camp, there is a greater emphasis on the one-on-one interviews with the coaching staffs and general managers than ever before.

Young draft hopefuls need to prepare for the one test nobody else can really help them with, the test that will give the teams the best window into their soul, where they will try to decipher and discover all of the intangibles that cannot be determined by a stopwatch or a measuring stick — the one-on-one interviews.

Before I get specific, first, some general guidelines and housekeeping. If you have a Facebook account with pictures of you in compromising and questionable activities, now is probably the time to delete them. If you have a Twitter account and you are infected with the sickness where your brain and thumbs don’t operate at the same time, you might want to suspend that account for the next little while, too.

The franchise personnel you will be meeting, for the most part, should be smart enough to realize you are going to tell them everything you think they want to hear. If they are savvy enough to use computers and search engines, they are gonna be eager to see snapshots of your life that aren’t edited for content. Not only will these two social media devices give them a better idea of who you really are, and not just how you present, but it will also tell them how disruptive you will be in a team environment and whether you are an accident looking for a place to happen.

Of course, these are general guidelines that anyone should follow in a job interview. What would really help is knowing and researching your specific audience to understand how to succeed. For example, if your one-on-one is with Eric Tillman, GM of the Edmonton Eskimos, you want to approach it very differently than, say, if you are face to face with Wally Buono of the B.C. Lions.

Tillman is a shrewd and unorthodox GM, so you need to present yourself as an outside-of-the-box thinker and personality. It takes a lot of stones to trade Ricky Ray for Stephen Jyles, so it makes sense that conventional wisdom and logical constructs will not necessarily score you points in your conversation with him.

If you interview with the godfather, Buono, do not melt or flinch under the heat of his menacing scowl. Stare right back but defer to him as often as possible in your responses, and drop the occasional reference to experiencing premonitions and letting them guide you in life, and he will eat it up.

And lastly, no matter who asks it, if you find yourself in a situation where you are queried extremely inappropriately — like what happened in the NFL a couple years ago when a player was asked if his mother was a prostitute by a Miami Dolphins representative — a stern right cross is an appropriate response. You won’t get drafted by that team, but someone else will definitely appreciate your moxie.

Doug Brown, once a hard-hitting defensive lineman and frequently a hard-hitting columnist, usually appears Tuesdays in the Free Press.