Great Read About The Draft

[maryjanewatson]

From CNNSI:

The Grand Stage
NFL Draft has become nation's biggest sports event
Posted: Wednesday April 25, 2007 11:27AM; Updated: Wednesday April 25, 2007 11:40PM

Today's hypothesis: The NFL Draft is the biggest sporting event in America. Before writing that bold sentence, I toyed with various other adjectives until settling on "biggest.'' Among them:

"Most significant.'' Is there a wimpier phrase for establishing importance? It claims heft, while leaving room for something larger, as if significance can be proved in almost any way.

"Most engaging.'' Deal or No Deal is engaging. American Idol is engaging. Under the right circumstances, a Tuesday night at Applebee's is engaging. It's another two-word combination that leaves room for escape if somebody challenges your claim. Oh, by "engaging,'' I just meant "interesting.''

"Hottest.'' The NFL Draft is many things. Hot is not one of them. The NFL draft is a haven for information geeks. That's not hot.

Face it, any description other than "biggest'' is a dodge, behind which a scribe can hide. No hiding here. After spending chunks of the last two months reporting a story in this week's issue of Sports Illustrated on the raging popularity of the draft, I'm convinced that there is not a bigger event on the U.S. sports landscape than the NFL Draft. And that includes the Super Bowl. (Sound effect: Audible gasp).

I know what you're thinking: Another columnist banging trash can lids in search of a reaction from the peanut gallery. Not so. This is from the heart. Here are four reasons why the draft is king.

1) The Draft is not a two-day event. It's a three-month event. NFL Nation (that's everybody) begins talking about the draft before the Super Bowl broadcast signs off. Draft guru Mel Kiper Jr. suggested to me that it starts even earlier than that. "I get calls from people in Week 5, Week 6, when their teams are starting to struggle,'' says Kiper. "They're already wondering who they might be able to get in the draft.'' (An aside here: It's a kick to hear Kiper talk about the Draft in his native Baltimore-ese. He pronounces Draft like it's Giraffe-t. That doesn't come across, even in Hi-Def).

From early February into late April, fans talk endlessly about the draft, watch and listen to shows about the draft and hammer Web sites devoted to the draft. In March, I went to dinner with a group of New York Giants' fans who worship football, the Jints and the draft. Great guys, all of them. But I've got to say, their knowledge of the draft was vaguely scary.

The hype is endless from the dead of winter into the middle of spring. Give me another event that can match this.

The Super Bowl? Hah. Two weeks of hype. Period.

Opening Day in baseball? Overshadowed by hot stove in the winter and roster juggling during spring training. Fans focus on Opening Day only for a few days in advance.

March Madness? Not a chance. All but the hoopheads tune in come late February.

I once had a newspaper editor of mine tell me: "Sports is all about leading in to the event.'' No more so than with the Draft.

2) The Draft has legs. There's conjecture three months leading in, endless debate afterward. The draft concludes early on a Sunday evening in New York (and on ESPN and the NFL Network and all over the Internet). But in a sense, when the networks say good-bye, that's just the beginning.

Think about this: The San Diego Chargers selected Ryan Leaf nine years ago and we're still talking about him today.



When training camp begins in July, we will train our eyes on the top draftees, looking for the smallest chinks in their armor, trying to see if they were the right pick. Even during the regular season, when a player is struggling we revert back to their draft year and find all the players who were selected after our struggling hero. There's not a frustrated Chicago Bears' alive who can't tell you that while Rex Grossman was selected 22nd in the first round of the 2003 Draft, the Dallas Cowboys managed to find Tony Romo as a free agent a few hours after the draft was finished.

The point is this: Teams never escape their drafts and players never escape their draft status. It defines them forever.

(Aside: Imagine if regular people had to endure this type of lasting scrutiny: "John, you met your sales quota again this quarter, but your numbers are disappointing for a first-round pick.'')

3) The Draft is the ultimate fan participation event.

Fantasy Football and Rotisserie Baseball are poor stepsisters in comparison to the draft. Fantasy games are just that: fantasy. The draft, on the other hand, allows fans to do exactly what the teams do: Watch, evaluate and select players. As Kiper said, "Everybody thinks he can be a general manager.'' (In my SI story, I quote Colts' GM Bill Polian agreeing with my assertion that no fan in control of his faculties thinks he can perform better than Peyton Manning. They can criticize Manning for making all that money and throwing interceptions in Foxboro, but they don't really think they could do any better. Meanwhile, many fans figure they can do exactly what Polian does).

After all, how much training or skill does it take to watch a few games and conclude: "Brady Quinn is no JaMarcus Russell?'' (The answer is: A lot. But it doesn't necessarily look like it takes a lot, as opposed to, say, blocking Michael Strahan coming off the edge on a speed rush.)

In this sense, the draft is very much like college recruiting. In reality, both are just the first step in a very long process that begins with the selection of a player and doesn't end until many years later when that player's career can be evaluated. But neither college nor NFL fans treat recruiting -- or the draft -- as an open-ended proposition. Instead, they view it as a victory or defeat on Signing Day or Draft Day.

What's more, fans can debate each other on Draft Day with absolute assurance that they are correct and with no fear of being proven wrong by the scoreboard.

4) The Draft has higher stakes than any game. Consider last year's Houston Texans. Several days after the draft, I sat with Texans' owner Robert McNair at his horse farm in Kentucky (it happens that McNair had a horse running in the Kentucky Derby: Bob and John). We talked a lot about horse racing and a little about the Draft, because McNair had signed off on the Texans' decision to select Mario Williams with the first pick in the draft, instead of Reggie Bush, Vince Young or even Matt Leinart.

McNair said all the right things on the day I talked to him and owned up to the pressure he felt in backing his football people's call. But look what has happened: Williams looks like an average player, Bush and Young are budding superstars and the Texans have cut loose former No. 1 pick David Carr in hopes that Matt Schaub is better than a backup quarterback. The entire franchise is on thin ice because of questionable decisions made on draft day. There's no single game -- maybe no single season -- that can impact a franchise so deeply and for so long.

And the Texans are just an example. The Falcons are running out of time with Michael Vick. Likewise the Giants with Eli Manning. The decisions that teams make on Draft Day will impact the franchise and its fans for years.

Because rookie salaries are so astronomical, the pressure on front offices to make successful picks is overwhelming, and yet they are wagering eight figures on players who have never played a snap in the NFL. It's madness, yet a GM can lose his job on draft day. He can't lose it on one bad Sunday, unless it's the culmination of many bad Sundays.

The greater proof is in the ratings. As I wrote this week in SI, more people watch the Draft than watch the NBA playoffs, selected NASCAR races or regular season college basketball. And they do so by a wide margin during the early rounds of the draft. Fans flood websites during the two days of the event.

The reality is that the NFL is by far the most popular sport in America. And while the Super Bowl is a 14-day explosion of hype, the Draft is a relentless presence that lasts nearly as long as the entire regular season. It is an accidental stroke of genius (Commissioner Bert Bell wasn't looking for ratings when he started the draft 71 years ago; he was just trying to give weaker teams a chance to sign good players), that dwarfs every sporting institution on the landscape.

[nensey_zy]

I too, find my self amazed by the amount of noise from the draft. We all say that it's important to build through the draft (except for Dan Snyder, of course), and we dissect pretty much every pick whether it's Mr. Irrelevant or our second rounder. I also find it fun that we tend to feel that the late-rounders are always gems no matter how good or bad they are. (Note: the only late rounders to do anything that contributed to our team in the past five years are Grads, Phillips, Buenning, and Allen.)