'Do you think your mom is attractive?': NFL retiree shares odd combine queries

A former NFL defensive end has taken to Twitter to share a sampling of the strangest inquiries he was asked as an attendee at the league’s scouting combine, a line of questioning that puts a fine point on the occasionally absurd lengths teams will go to in their evaluation of prospects.

Austen Lane was no shrinking violet with the media during a peripatetic five-year career – and hardly the most reliable narrator after posting a fake workout routine on Twitter that was widely circulated in June 2012 – but many of the queries he shared on Tuesday morning seem too strange to be fiction.

Among the questions posed by NFL coaches and front-office personnel that Lane shared with his social media following:

• Would he kill someone if he knew he could get away with it?
  
• Did he think his mother was attractive?
• “I see you have dreads, you smoke weed don’t you?”
• If he had to murder someone, would he use a gun or a knife?
  
• “Boxers or briefs?”

Lane, a journeyman who was drafted by the Jacksonville Jaguars in 2010 before stints with the Chiefs, Lions and Bears, announced his retirement in August.

The Murray State alum made headlines in 2013 when he penned a series of thoughtful first-person essays for the MMQB on what it’s like to be cut by an NFL team.