Staff Blog
Why the NFL Draft Format Makes No Sense
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This Saturday the NBA will put a group of its finest players on display: Dwyane Wade, Kobe, Dirk, CP3, and the gang will all face off in meaningful playoff games. Die hard sports fans will no doubt tune in.
Not that those die hards will be able to sit back and just watch the League though: the Yankees and the Red Sox continue their first set of the year when hard throwing former Marlins A.J. Burnett and Josh Beckett go after each other and, later, the World F. Champions take the field against the NL East leaders.
The plethora of sports watches doesn’t end there: if you’re a sticks fan the hockey playoffs are scheduling five games, all of which could theoretically end a series.
Put simply, if you love TV sports, Saturday isn’t a bad one to sit back with a beer and a remote and disappear for a day.
Against all of this the NFL draft will foolishly attempt to compete.
I don’t suggest they’re foolish because they’ll lose the ratings war – it’s the NFL after all, and they’ll probably draw as many viewers as all the real games combined – but rather because they know they’ll win it, and they’re still shooting their load on a crowded day like this Saturday. The draft has become an event, with full national coverage, overdone analysis (must improve: too many graphics) and more pre-event hype than a Papal Coronation.
Much has been made about how long drafts take and how they drag on. And yet still, the draft continues to grow. People eat it up. They pretend to complain about the to long timing, but can’t help but keep tuning in. As Sean Carter once mused, “They criticize me for it yet they all yell holla.” The fans won’t stop watching.
With that in mind, the draft shouldn’t be sped up and forced to compete more narrowly with all these games, it should be slowed down and made into a giant event unto itself. The National Football Draft shouldn’t occur over two busy days in sports – it should occur over a full month. One a day, from nine in the morning until five at night, a team would have the option to make their draft selection or entertain trade offers to leave it. Seriously.
Think about it, the drama and intrigue around the draft has sports fans hooked. Mock drafts are popular no matter how wrong they always are – because fans love speculating and guessing at what is going to happen. Analytically speaking, not a lot happens in-between the combine and draft, and yet fans still obsess over the possibilities. If the NFL changed its format to allow each pick to occur once a day, that speculating would be more evenly spread out, and more intense. Better, this new format wouldn’t just add intrigue, it would several currently existing problems with the draft as it stands now.
In the current set up too many teams milk the clock only to take an offensive guard, which is then followed by a flurry of trades because the teams below didn’t expect someone to drop. Remember how hard the Browns tried to squeeze back into the first round when Brady Quinn started to slip? Well, now they they’d have a full day to keep trying to make those trades. Better, if they kept failing, the public pressure would be loud and obvious.
It would add yet another level of gamesmanship as well. The full day would give the team on the clock the ability to negotiate contract details with potential picks the same way the Lions have the right to with the first pick. You how how Aaron Curry is talking to the media about how he’ll happily take less money for the chance to come to Detroit and wreck havoc with Ernie Sims and Julian Peterson? Well, now every prospect would have the same chance. Imagine an unpopular GM about to make an unpopular choice, knowing not only that he’ll be booed for his selection for the next fifteen minutes, but that fans will be his neck the entire day, all while some hometown hero joins them and pleas for his selection.
There would be endless topics to pay attention to; the players, agents, and most importantly fans would win big, and the suspense would do nothing but grow. On top of all that Football, with its impossibly long offseason, suddenly gets a full month of coverage in the middle of its down time.
Look, there are some flaws that need to be ironed out: I imagine the remaining six rounds occurring just like they are now at a weekend after the first round is over but that would need to be addressed, the players might buck a bit at anything that had the potential for drastically more trades, the exact timing of the month would still to be ironed out, the Networks would have to get on board, and America can only withstand so much Mel Kiper Jr. in a year without exploding. Still, those are all roadbumps and not landmines.
On Saturday I’ll plop down in front my TV, switch back and forth between baseball and basketball and keep half an eye on the draft on computer – the exact same thing I’d do if it were the Lions drafting instead of the entire league. But if it were Eagles Saturday, where they were drafting 21st amidst two-week long rumors that they were planning on bypassing Moreno for Alex Mack, well, I don’t know if I could turn away.
