“Combine interview sessions are notoriously harsh and occasionally venture into the surreal,” Schefter said. “So this waterboarding thing should come as no surprise to anybody. I’m told that one of the kids almost died, and another went mad. A couple of them did really well, though, and improved their draft stock. Hey, say what you want, but these teams are paying these players a lot of money and they want to know how they react to adverse situations.”

Schefter noted that none of the waterboarded players were compelled to press charges or hold teams accountable in any way for the illegal torture.

“These kids don’t want to come out publicly and complain about this,” said Schefter. “I think they’re basically looking at it as a test of their resilience and they want to show that they passed that test. Although the kid that was taken out on a stretcher and sent to intensive care obviously didn’t pass the test. He’ll never play for a Bill Belichick-coached team.”

A few of the victims did speak anonymously about their experiences in the interview room. One, a marginal tight end prospect from the SEC, described how the waterboarding came about.

“I was interviewing with the Dolphins and Coach Sparano asked me if I had ever heard of waterboarding,” said one player. “I told him I had. Then he rolled out this waterboard and told me to hop on. He said if I couldn’t handle this there was no way I could handle being in the trenches in an NFL game. Honestly, I did better than I thought I would, though by the time it was done I had confessed to the bombing of the U.S. consulate in Karachi.”

Another prospect described waterboarding at the hands of Patriots coach Bill Belichick:

“He just kept dunking my head in the water and screaming, ‘What’s the most important thing in your life?’ At first I was like, ‘God and family! God and family!’ But then after a while I was like, ‘Okay it’s football. It’s football! Please stop torturing me!’ So he finally pulled me out of the water. Then he threw me a towel and said I was a coward for changing my answer.”

The league said it would look into allegations of waterboarding but said it was highly unlikely that any charges would be brought against the teams, who were merely “doing their due diligence.”

“We’ll look into it,” said league spokesman Greg Aiello. “But honestly, there’s not much we can do about this kind of thing. Teams have a right to do their due diligence on players and the league very rarely stands in the way of it. Think about it: if you were going to pay a kid tens of millions of dollars to play for your team, wouldn’t you want to torture them first? Personally, I’d like to torture anyone making millions of dollars to play a game for a living.”