Combine time!

Or ... Men In Shorts Running And Jumping And Stuff For No Particular Reason.

Yes, the NFL combine's time has come 'round again, slouching toward irrelevance to be borne -- as T.S. Eliot almost said. T.S. had a killer 40 time, by the way. He looked good in shorts, too. But he bombed on the Wonderlic and in the one-on-one interviews, where he leaped across the desk and grabbed an NFL GM by the throat because the GM asked him if he had a thing for his mother.

No, really. This sort of stuff actually happens at the NFL combine.

It's the week when analysis veers across the line into utter lunacy, because the entire purpose is lunacy: Trying to accurately predict whether a prospective draft pick will be a boom or a bust. That this is clearly a hopeless task is obvious to anyone with a working brain cell, but bless their hearts, the NFL's poobahs try anyway. That they do it mostly via a series of non sequitirs only heightens the lunacy.

Seriously, folks. What does a prospective offensive lineman's 40 time tell you about anything?Because how many times is he ever going to have to run 40 yards in a game?

Same goes for pretty much anyone. If, say, a wide receiver, defensive back or running back is really fast, isn't that something NFL teams already know? Hey, look, Kyler Murray's really fast! Well, I'll be darned!

And this doesn't even address the obvious, which is that your 40 time in shorts, your vertical leap in shorts and your shuttle run time in shorts have absolutely zero to do with whether or not you can play football. Renaldo Nehemiah, the world class hurdler the 49ers signed as a wide receiver some years back, no doubt would have killed all of those. But he wasn't much of a football player.

Even sillier is the Wonderlic football IQ test, historically worthless for predicting NFL success.  Dan Marino, for instance, scored 16 out of 50 on the Wonderlic; he's in the Hall of Fame now. Frank Gore's score of 6 is the fourth lowest Wonderlic score in NFL history. Someday he'll be in Canton, too.

And everyone else?

Well, combine week is mostly just make work a prospect has to slog through. In fact, that may be the method behind the madness; the suspicion is the combine is specifically designed to be 99 percent nonsense, because it's all about finding out how potential draft picks deal with, well, nonsense -- a useful skill for anyone who wants to work in the NFL.

Hence the irrelevant sprints and jumps and such. Hence the Wonderlic. Hence the bizarre interviews with GMs who seem inordinately interested in their prospects' relationships with their mothers.

Lot of GMs out there with mommy issues. That's the Blob's takeaway from that.

Though some of them run decent 40s, I hear.