Well, not really…but it’s where you have to go if you want to find all of the NFL’s top prospects this weekend.
The annual combine is underway under the big top that Bob Irsay built in the city that anyone born before 1970 loves to hate here in Baltimore.
This is my second NFL combine (I went last year for the first time) and Casey Willett and I will be doing it up right: full interviews with scouts, coaches, agent, players and front office personnel from teams all around the league for AM 1570 and wnsTV.
Unlike the Super Bowl, which is more schmooze-oriented for the week, the NFL Combine is serious business for every breathing person in the league.
It’s literally a convention of hardcore football for a few days, where football and strategy and times and weights and fundamentals are all that’s on anyone’s minds. No parties, no MTV, no rock stars…
The bad news: you always have to go to Indy to do it. It’s a city that’s connected via heated walkways, it has a vast convention center and dome and it’s centrally located.
The worse part: the city is really one giant mall and EVERYWHERE I went last year I got stuck staring at World Championship swag with the stolen horseshoe.
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And even though the 24th anniversary of the team leaving town is upon us, it’s impossible to go to Indianapolis without thinking at least one or two nasty thoughts if you grew up in Baltimore before 1984.
Now, I just have a chuckle. Because the whole reason I’m even IN Indianapolis is because we have a team called the Ravens.
And, other than the fact that I wouldn’t want to live in Indianapolis, it’s not really so bad.
I have a lot of memories there from the Ravens’ first trip in during the 1996 baseball playoffs when the O’s lost to the Yankees. The city was overrun with Baltimoreans and we all watched the Orioles and raised a whole lot of “cain” in the bars there (kinda like Red Sox and Yankees fans do here every summer).
There are good restaurants, it’s easy to navigate and you never have to go outside and freeze. It’s a good place to spend a weekend, and I’ve spent a dozen of them there considering combines, NCAA tournaments and Ravens and Colts games over the years.
We’ll be following lots of storylines over the weekend in Indy and we’ll be reporting back with good stuff.
8If ya gotta go to Indianapolis for ANY reason, you might as well make the most of it!
More to come…
