My love-hate relationship with the NFL draft
Julie Kendall
The NFL draft is in three weeks. What have you done to prepare?
According to the league and every media outlet that serves it, you should be vigilantly familiarizing yourself with every eligible player’s backstory and stats, every team’s roster needs and every combination of potential draft-day scenarios.
It’s impossible not to get caught up in this whirlwind of speculation designed to fill the massive void between seasons. It saturates our sports media sources with glossy player profiles, ever-changing rumor reports, and mock drafts drawn up by every talking head in the industry. It’s at once wildly irritating and undeniably engaging.
The draft has undergone a substantial makeover since it was instated back in 1936. For the first 15 years of the National Football League, incoming players could simply sign with whichever team they wanted to play for. As a result, the already-good teams became magnets for talent, while losing teams kept floundering when they failed to attract good players. An owner of one of these terrible teams came up with the idea to give teams exclusive negotiation rights with their selected players, giving priority choice to the poorest performing teams in the effort to create competitive parity and equal-opportunity profitability.
Now, imagine what this inaugural draft looked like: Scouting did not exist. Player ability was deduced through college news sources and hearsay.
Most athletes and fans did not even know the draft was happening; owners from the league’s nine teams gathered in a conference room at a Philadelphia hotel, and selected in nine rounds from names scrawled on a blackboard.
A vast majority of those drafted never ended up signing with a team, because the salary was terrible: Top players earned a meager $250 a game, and most made less than $75 a week.
Yet, the draft did what it was intended to, strengthening weak teams on the field and in their bank accounts. The process evolved. Scouting began in the 1940s, and the addition of the AFL in the ‘60s elevated the competition. ESPN began broadcasting the affair on television in the ‘80s, despite the doubts of NFL commissioner Pete Rozelle that fans would find it entertaining.
And now? There’s no denying that draft speculation has become its own form of entertainment and profitability. The selection process itself is a three-day hyperbolic affair, preceded by months of highly-publicized scouting events. Sponsors now exploit the occasion to its full advertising potential. The stakes have intensified. Contracts penned this summer will grant players millions of dollars and unrivaled prestige.
But once the season starts, chances are we won’t be hearing about the majority of these young men we spent months fawning over. Most will fade into the background, training quietly behind veterans to earn playing time, or else falling from expected glory when their college skills fail to translate in the pro game.
The NFL draft has constructed its own significance, and the thought of it is terribly disconcerting. Yet, I can’t resist getting sucked into the void of conjecture every time I go within proximity to sports news.
So congrats, NFL media toadies; you win this one. I’ll be watching, but I won’t be happy about it.