Vikings Message Board.Com

Nice resource and something to keep in mind when taking a look at this year's numbers.

http://espn.go.com/nfl/draft2013/story/ ... e-averages

Some behind-the-scenes.

Lane Johnson - T - Player

Oklahoma LT Lane Johnson described his Combine interview with the Bengals as "probably the weirdest meeting I've ever been a part of."

Some truly weird stuff goes on in these Combine team interviews. "I went in there and they told me to remember five things," Johnson recalled. "They just listed five things like a bear, a flower, a tree, a man, and like a dog. And they told me to remember those terms, at the end of the meeting to see if I could remember them. And from that point on, they listed numbers. They said, like, 9-1-6-7, and then told me to repeat them in reverse order." Johnson is going to be a top-11 draft pick.
Source: Sports Radio Interviews

80 PurplePride 84 wrote:Apparently some prospect (forget who) was asked if he likes girls.

Technically, as these could be considered interviews for a job, a question like that is illegal.

BGM wrote: Technically, as these could be considered interviews for a job, a question like that is illegal.

It's state by state. Some organizations can get away with questions like that because they're technically hiring for a job in their state, which doesn't implement the same AA policies.

I can basically understand Johnson's question...that one seems pretty straightforward. It's basically a test to see if someone has the short term memory retention needed to take slightly complex direction and implement it as directed. Any job that requires you to take a list of activities and perform them in a precise manner would probably have a question like that in the interview. When you take a lot of helmet to helmet hits over the course of a young career, and drink a fair amount of beer in college, that short term retention might be somewhat impaired in some of these kids.

I guess I'm not as weirded out by a lot of the questions (with the exception of "do you like girls", which has no logical bearing whatsoever on whether or not you'll execute your job on a particular play as required) as most as I've conducted more than a few interviews in my time. A big part of it is being able to take a more complex job task and "generalize" it (say, replace one part of a command, like "update the inventory in aisles 2, 5, and 10" with "stack cans" or something like that) so that an interviewee can answer it within time constraints. Bad interviewers basically sit and throw complex job tasks at some guy, and the end result is that you always end up going back and forth and wasting time on particulars that you could be spending on asking the next question.

Rus wrote:I can basically understand Johnson's question...that one seems pretty straightforward. It's basically a test to see if someone has the short term memory retention needed to take slightly complex direction and implement it as directed. Any job that requires you to take a list of activities and perform them in a precise manner would probably have a question like that in the interview. When you take a lot of helmet to helmet hits over the course of a young career, and drink a fair amount of beer in college, that short term retention might be somewhat impaired in some of these kids.

I guess I'm not as weirded out by a lot of the questions (with the exception of "do you like girls", which has no logical bearing whatsoever on whether or not you'll execute your job on a particular play as required) as most as I've conducted more than a few interviews in my time. A big part of it is being able to take a more complex job task and "generalize" it (say, replace one part of a command, like "update the inventory in aisles 2, 5, and 10" with "stack cans" or something like that) so that an interviewee can answer it within time constraints. Bad interviewers basically sit and throw complex job tasks at some guy, and the end result is that you always end up going back and forth and wasting time on particulars that you could be spending on asking the next question.

I think the I like girls question is mainly to see what happens when they get thrown a curveball and something that is unexpected and how they react to it. Almost like getting a really horrible call that dictates a game, or etc.