The scouting combine is not be trusted

Four years ago, Pete Carroll told the reporters who had convened in Indianapolis to cover the league’s annual scouting combine that the Seahawks had no plans to trade Russell Wilson.

Less than a week later, Adam Schefter broke the news that Wilson would be dealt to Denver.

Last year in Indianapolis, John Schneider expressed a clear desire to stick with Geno Smith at quarterback.

Nine days later, the Seahawks agreed to trade Smith to Las Vegas for a third-round pick.

Now I’m not saying any of that to suggest that there’s any uncertainty about Seattle’s situation at quarterback this year.

There is not.¹

But you shouldn’t take anything you hear this week from Indianapolis as any sort of indication about what’s going to happen in the NFL this offseason for reasons I’ll get to in a second.

A great sports owner is identified mostly by two things they don’t do.

1. They don’t thrust themselves into the day-to-day decisions that are best left to the professionals whose job revolves around preparing and/or evaluating the players who are paid to participate in a given sport;

2. They don’t demand credit for the accomplishments of their team.

That’s not the only criteria of course.

A good owner must provide not just adequate, but ample funding. You clearly don’t want a penny pincher. You also don’t want someone so concerned with being “profitable” that they lose sight of the fact that owners make their money when they sell the team. And if you’re worried about how much money you’re “losing” that’s exactly what you should do: sell.

But as much as fans will complain about a cheapskate owner, the truth is that having a profligate spender who has a weekly radio show and answers questions in the locker room after every game is every bit as big an obstacle to winning a championship. Just ask a Cowboys fan.

That’s a long way of saying it’s hard to anticipate who would make a good owner of the Seattle Seahawks. We do have one (potential) candidate with local ties and strong a track record of trying, though: Steve Ballmer.

I also have a hare-brained idea that I planted in my most recent column for The News Tribune:

• Which billionaire should we want as Seahawks owner?

  By Danny O’Neil

I first attended the NFL’s annual scouting combine in 2009. I went back for each of the next five years.

It remains the single strangest “event” that I’ve ever covered in my capacity as a journalist, which is saying something.

I’ve covered an X Games. I’ver written about boat racing. In fact, I am the two-time “Hydroplane Writer of the Year” which is kind of like being named “The Best Sushi in Iowa” only less tasty.

The scouting combine is as close as the NFL gets to an annual convention. There is no other time where you have even close to that many coaches, executives, owners and player agents in the same place.

In fact, the only thing that stops me from saying that pretty much every decision-maker who matters is the fact that the Rams — and now the Jacksonville Jaguars — have made a recent point of not being there.

The Super Bowl may be the league’s biggest event each year, but that’s more of a party for fans and sponsors. Indianapolis is where the decion-makers converge. They’re purportedly there to watch that year’s draft class exercise in their underwear, but what’s really happening, though, is that teams are preparing themselves to reshape their rosters.

You won’t know that from anything that gets reported this week, though.

That’s not a criticism of the journalists who are there.

They will be asking the right questions. In fact, they will get to ask the right questions to the right people since every head coach in Indianapolis and pretty much every general manager will be trotted into the media center.

They’re not going to tell us what’s going on.

I’m not saying they should be expected to tell us what’s going on. There’s no reason for any team to telegraph its intentions on what it plans to do when the league year starts in March.

It does create an exceptionally weird dynamic, though, where clear-cut and fairly definitive declarations from NFL coaches and GMs can’t be taken at face value.

The Bengals are going to be asked about Joe Burrow’s future, the Raiders about Maxx Crosby’s.

Coaches and executives from both teams are going to downplay any uncertainty about their future, but I won’t for a second believe that constitutes a final answer on either subject.

1  Not unless we’re talking about backup quarterback. Then I suppose there’s some uncertainty over whether Jalen Milroe progresses to become Sam Darnold’s primary back-up next season or he remains the team’s No. 3 QB. Even there, I would argue that if Milroe isn’t the backup, it’s a pretty solid sign that things aren’t progressing as Seattle had hoped when it drafted him in the third round of last year’s draft.