Welcome to silly season, the very start of it in fact, in which NFL head coaches, general managers and owners, and anybody else in a position of power on any of the 32 teams, say a lot of things that mean absolutely nothing.

It is just rhetoric. It is verbal diarrhea, as I’ve heard said by former Browns head coach Sam Rutigliano.

This is a high stakes card, game, one in which you can’t let anyone not just see your cards, but have any idea at all what you want to do with them. As such, they are not going to do anything at all to let you know what their motives may be, or to give any himt, verbal or otherwise, to reveal their plans. 

It starts with the NFL Combine this week in Indianapolis and continues up through the NFL Draft in a couple months. Draft prospects will show up and run around and jump, get weighed and measured and do all these kinds of agility drills to show just how athletic and appealing they are leading into the draft. Teams are checking these guys out from top to bottom, but they won’t tell you what they’re looking for or who they’re looking at.

The best that you can do, and the smartest thing you can do, as a fan is to not listen to what they have to say, but instead look at how they say it. Watch the voice inflections and the body language, and that’s all you need to know.

Enjoy. And smile — a lot — and you are allowed to laugh, too. It’s all just a bunch of gobbledygook.

Steve King