ENGLEWOOD - The recollection comes with a laugh now, nicely framed in the benefit of hindsight.

"At the time, they said I was bowlegged," Broncos defensive end Elvis Dumervil said. "Bowlegged. That's what they said. How can you say that? Bowlegged. I didn't get it."

But there it is. In a text-happy, get-it-downloaded, wired world where opinions, informed or otherwise, reign, the words can fly like sticks and stones. Especially in the weeks and months leading to an NFL draft.

And Saturday night at Invesco Field at Mile High, with the Cleveland Browns in the house for a preseason game against the Broncos (7 p.m., CBS 4), this year's case study in predraft pessimism - Browns quarterback Brady Quinn - might get to play in the game's second half.

Quinn, who threw for 11,762 yards as a four-year starter with Notre Dame, entered his senior season for the Irish as the highest-ranked senior offensive player in the nation.

By the time the draft rolled around, Quinn was the face of misery on coast-to-coast television as team after team passed on him until the Browns made a trade to take him with the 22nd pick of the first round.

It became so difficult for some to watch as the last undrafted player remaining of the five who were invited to attend the draft in New York that at one point, NFL commissioner Roger Goodell invited Quinn to sit with him out of the public eye until he was selected.

"It actually began the day before when a couple of players asked if I had any advice," Goodell said in a visit to the Browns camp last week. "I told them that in reality, one of the five (players) was going to be the last one selected and it's going to be difficult and will seem difficult for a long period of time.

"But when you look back at it several years later, it won't be that big of an issue. I think the focus on that wasn't right. It's not why we ask players to come to the draft. I thought it was appropriate to bring him in and let him sit and to see what happens with his family."

Former Titans general manager Floyd Reese often has said the predraft evaluation can turn into "can't-do time," as in "sometimes we spend a lot of time with what guys can't do instead of kind of remembering that the reason we're looking at them in the first place (is) because they played pretty well for somebody."

But things get said. That they are too short. Too tall. Too skinny. Too fat. Too much trouble.

That they are too much of something, perhaps not enough of another.

And sometimes what is brought up can be as big a surprise to the player as it was to anybody else.

"I had a coach from one team come into Kalamazoo (Mich.) to interview me and go on and on about two altercations I had been in off the field," the Broncos' Tony Scheffler said. "He was explaining how they happened, what he heard, where it was, and I had absolutely no idea what he was talking about.

"He was sitting there telling about these two bar fights I was supposedly in, and nothing like that ever happened, ever. Only one team brought that up, so I don't know where they got their information."

In Quinn's case, scouts and personnel executives picked away he might not have the upside as some of the other quarterback prospects, that he might have reached a developmental plateau. And they poked at an 0-3 record in bowl games.

Quinn joked before the draft he once heard an update about his falling draft status on a day when all he had done was run and lift weights.

"See, now I didn't hear anything crazy like that when I came out," said Broncos defensive end Kenard Lang, a first-round pick by the Washington Redskins in 1997. "I came out (from Miami) as a junior, under the radar, went to California to work out and didn't hear all that.

"I think guys now go through a lot more scrutiny and get looked at more than we did even in 1997."

Scheffler said players' families get wrapped up in it as well, scanning the Internet, watching highlight shows, trying to see what's being written or said.

He said it's "real easy to kind of get caught up in it."

Which is why Dumervil said he did his best to wave away the bowlegged assessment. After measuring 5-11 3/8 at the 2006 scouting combine, Dumervil already was battling scouts' perceptions he was too short to play defensive end in the NFL.

That was despite a senior season with Louisville in which he finished with 20 sacks - the second-highest single-season total in NCAA Division I-A history - as well as an NCAA record 10 forced fumbles.

"I had my stats, they had the height," Dumervil said. "I knew I was going to get dogged with that. It happens. So, if you want to look around and read stuff to make you feel good, fine, but I would tell people all that stuff really doesn't matter. It's how you play between the white lines. You can get somebody with nice height or nice size, but they can't play the game."

Echoed Lang: "Computers don't play the game, individuals do. There are a lot of guys who test great, look great, sound great and get a lot of compliments from everybody, but as an NFL player, they weren't worth a hill of beans."

legwoldj@RockyMountainNews.com or 303-954-2359

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