April 22, 2026, 10:11 AM EDT In the months before the 2002 NFL draft, all kinds of metrics suggested Joey Harrington was bound to be a top-5 pick. As Oregon’s quarterback, he’d led his team near the top of the polls and become a finalist of college football’s biggest awards. It was an impressive body of work. But as he and fellow prospects waited inside an Indianapolis hotel that winter during the league’s annual scouting combine, no evaluation of Harrington was complete until NFL evaluators had also judged his actual body. “You literally have to stand in your underwear on a stage in front of a room full of executives that have their notepad out,” Harrington told NBC News. When evaluators from 32 teams gather in a room, not everyone sees the same thing. The players they’re scouting are already outliers: of the more than 1 million high schoolers who play football annually in the United States, fewer than 78,000 go on to play in college, with only 1,696 active roster spots in the NFL.…