Before all of the madness associated with the NFL Draft gets underway next week, allow me to offer an apology to everyone having to go through this. I am partially to blame for what the NFL Draft has become.
Individually, I’ve had very little to do with it. But my generation as a whole has fed the beast that is coming to town like Godzilla showing up on the shores of some poor, unsuspecting city in those campy Japanese monster movies.
It didn’t use to be like this. If you were to call up news stories or archive photos of the NFL Draft from when it was first held in 1936 until somewhere around 1990 or so, you’ll find it was just a bunch of team personnel sitting around at tables with telephones, sending their picks up to the podium on note cards where the Commissioner would read them and teams would cross out names on their potential draft boards. Those already selected were written in chalk on a chalkboard on the stage.
Scouting was anything but a science at the time. There was no Combine for potential draftees to show off their skills. Teams would have had to send scouts to college games or request copies of game films from schools to see what a player was able to do. NFL teams would often just draft guys that had played college ball in the same region, hoping that their college fan base would follow them to games on Sunday instead of Saturday.
Fans were nowhere to be seen in the first 50+ years of the Draft. Who would want to sit around all day and wait for names to be called out? Besides, who could possibly know everything about all 200-guys that were being selected every year?
But that all changed after ESPN was given permission to be in the conference room and broadcast the proceedings in 1980. At that time, ESPN wasn’t as ubiquitous as it is now. Not every cable system carried it, and because it didn’t have broadcast rights to any professional sports, its audience was still limited. But as the 80’s moved into the 90’s ESPN was a household name. Guys like me, then in my early 20’s, watched shows like Sportscenter, Baseball Tonight, and especially NFL Primetime, with its comprehensive highlight packages of the Sunday games and player stats needed to track Fantasy Football, religiously. Their sports anchors were our heroes. Sportscenter with Dan Patrick and Keith Olbermann was required viewing every night. Ratings for the draft started to increase annually.
Along with that rise in popularity came the rise of the “draft experts”. Nobody in the world knew who Mel Kiper, Junior was until ESPN gave him a spot at the broadcast table with Chris Berman and allowed him to present his “big board” of prospects, ranked by their quality (in his opinion). What’s more, they allowed him to openly criticize NFL general managers that did not select players in the order that he had ranked them. That rankled NFL brass, leading to the infamous moment in 1994 when Kiper called the Indianapolis Colts the “laughingstock of the NFL”–and their General Manager Bill Tobin was asked to respond live on the air. His answer: “Who the hell is Mel Kiper, Junior?!?!?”
It was also around that time that the NFL moved the draft to venues large enough to hold fans to witness the proceedings. Giants, Jets, and Eagles fans dominated those first few years, given their proximity to New York City. It wasn’t long before ESPN was making them part of the show. Every pick (especially of the East Coast teams) would feature a quick cut to the fans giving their immediate reactions (usually over the top). It was great theater–and ratings continued to rise.
And then guys like me and my friends decided that we should all share that experience together. Saturday Draft Parties became annual events looked forward to more than the start of the NFL season itself. Twelve hours of drinking, arguing about picks, eating, yelling at the TV, reacting like the fans in the theater, and a good measure of betting made for a great time. Then, we started bringing our own “draft boards”, ranking our own players and tracking who had drafted who throughout the day.
Honestly, we were a bit jealous of those guys getting on TV every year to boo every pick, or react like a left tackle from Auburn was going to be the key to our team going to the Super Bowl. The NFL moved from a hotel ballroom to the theater at Madison Square Garden, to Radio City Music Hall. Suddenly, several thousand fans were on-site. ESPN touted the draft 365-days a year. The “Annual Player Selection Meeting” (as Chris Berman called it for 45-years) was a see and be seen event.
The players themselves played into this hype as well. College apparel was replaced by designer suits. Anyone that might have a chance to get picked in the first round had to be on-site, to be shown on TV getting “the call” from the team taking them next, and putting the giant bro hug on the Commissioner in recognition that they had just cashed in a huge lottery ticket. This week, I’ve been asked to cover the “red carpet arrival” of those top prospects Thursday night, like they are movie stars showing up to the Oscars.
It was 2015 that the NFL Draft broke containment and became a national spectacle. The year before, the Draft had to be pushed back to May because the Radio City Music Hall Rockettes had their spring show scheduled for the arena during the usual Draft dates. That’s when the league decided, “Let’s take this thing on the road!” The 2015 and 2016 Drafts were held in Grant Park in Chicago–still on a Saturday–and tens of thousands of people showed up both times. By 2019, things got way out of hand. An estimated 600-thousand people crammed into downtown Nashville to watch teams announce names.
To be fair, there is more than the actual Draft that is now part of the show. The NFL Experience is taking up more room around Lambeau Field than the Draft stage does. And apparently, you can’t have a sports event without a bunch of concerts tied to it as well. Wouldn’t want people to not be entertained for five or ten minutes at a time.
So this upcoming week, I will get to experience what I had wished I could when I was a much younger man. And so will a quarter-million other folks that probably don’t even remember having to wait for the Monday afternoon newspaper to find out who had been picked by each team. Some will come with apps sending them continuous updates on “Mel’s Big Board”, some will come to “create content” for their eight social media followers, and some will come because their will be lots of loud noise and flashing lights and a chance to be on TV for a few seconds.
And I’m guessing that after about a half hour after potential picks are telling us assembled media along the red carpet what designer they are wearing, that I’m going to wish that me, my friends, and the rest of the guys my age had treated NFL Draft day like Hall of Famer and former Wisconsin Badger Joe Thomas did when he was take in the first round in 2007. He went fishing with his dad instead.
