The NFL Combine was this past weekend. What should take a few hours has been bloated to a full six days of watching college football players run, jump and lift things. Forget the past three or four years you spent playing the game of football on a very high level against stiff competition, this is where you make your money.

This year, along with a select group of college football’s most gifted players and finest athletes, the NFL invited us at Sod to join in on the fun.

Of course, we accepted.

After a bit of research which reveal that it was not, as we had assumed, some sort of collaboration between the National Football League and John Deere to promote their new line of combines and tractors, but in fact a test of physical strength, endurance and explosion. We started to get very worried. Physical exertion is not our strong-suit.

Undaunted, in-between breaks to post incalculably witty articles on our site, we’ve been training with the best personal trainer our ad money can buy. Namely, one of the guys we went to high school with that was totally ripped ten years ago. Sure, he’s been drinking heavily since then and has a dead-end job unloading pallets of used clothes for Goodwill, but he was totally ripped in high school.

Plus, it was a great way to subordinate a guy that routinely lined us up for what he and his friends cheerfully referred to as “wedgie inspections.” Payback is a bitch. Never underestimate the grudges held by scrawny, pimple-faced geeks.

So, the whole lot of us showed up last Thursday, ready to blow the doors off all of those fancy-pants NFL scouts and hotshot college standouts.

Unfortunately, it didn’t work out so well.

In the shuttle runs, we got dizzy from all the change of direction and passed out.

In the 225lb bench press, we got deep bruises on our chests from the force of the insanely heavy bar smashing into our ribcage.

We skipped out on the broad jump, deeming it to be a sexist exercise, only to later realize that “broad” simply meant jumping as far as you can from a standing position. Still, better safe than sorry.

The vertical leap involved jumping as high as possible upwards and slapping some plastic markers. Sadly, we’re a bunch of white kids from the upper midwest and had to bow out due to practical considerations. No way in hell can any of us jump more than a few inches off the ground, and not even that high if a mouse isn’t loose in our general vicinity.

The last of the physical rigors that we had was the 40 yard dash, long the measuring stick of success for NFL hopefuls. A good showing in the 40 can mean the difference of millions of dollars or a job stocking shelves at your local Piggly Wiggly.

We’ve all submitted our applications.

Unable to finish even a 40 yard sprint, each of us limped into the locker room to recover before being interviewed by representatives of all 32 NFL teams. At least that part went well. We’re good talkers, especially after receiving a vitamin B-12 shot each to help with our recovery, or something. That’s what the trainer told us it was and it was for, and we’re sticking to that.

In all, we walked away with the general impression that these athletes and the men that subject them to these tests are inhumane at best and insane at worst. There’s a reason that we evolved enough to create computers and cars and Segways, so that these tests of strength would become irrelevant and outdated.

We have computer games that allow us to be better at football than any of the men we competed with, with the added bonus of not having to run or jump or even get off the couch, and we like it that way.

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