Combine time!

 Tomorrow in Indianapolis begins the NFL's annual Festival of Analysis Paralysis -- aka, the NFL Combine -- and the Blob can barely contain its excitement. This is because one of its favorite things is ridiculing perceived silliness, and the combine is nothing if not silly a great deal of the time.

For the next week, we'll see large men in shorts running, large men in shorts jumping, and large men in shorts being poked, prodded and measured in what evokes uncomfortably a slave auction in the antebellum South. Words like "tight skin", "waist-bender" and "burst" will be thrown around. Half the invited quarterbacks won't show up, because ... 

Well. Because the combine has very little to do with whether or not they can actually play football.

This goes for the running backs, the wide receivers, the edge rushers, and the O-linemen, too, of course. That's not really what the combine is about, after all.

 In an era when teams have warehouses of video on prospective draft picks, everyone has already identified who can play and who can't. Usually they've even broken it down into smaller increments, like who can will be an impact player right away, who projects to be an impact player with the proper coaching, and who will be Mr. Irrelevant -- i.e., the last player taken in the draft.

No, the combine is largely a stress test to see who can maintain his cool through a week of intense, numbing and sometimes pointless scrutiny. It's a bit like that part in "The Right Stuff" where the prospective astronaut pool is weeded out via a lot of humiliating physical and psychological tests. 

At least the NFL has decided to rein in the humiliation part. That's why GMs are now prohibited from asking prospects if their mothers were prostitutes, or if a prospect was gay. Also gone is the utterly useless Wonderlic test, which measured precisely nothing.

Some of the best players in NFL history posted some of the worst Wonderlic scores. And vice-versa. So, out it goes.

Too bad, in a way. The Wonderlic was so easy to make fun of, after all.

Now we'll just have to make fun of how excited everyone gets over some right tackle's 40 time. And wonder, as we always do, why we shouldn't be paying more attention to his 10-yard time, seeing how 10 yards is going to be the farthest he ever runs most of the time.

Ah, but enough of that. Let's line up those big hosses, and stop with the nitpicking. It's go time, baby.

Or, you know, some kinda time.