The Fall of the NFL Draft
How the NFL, in an attempt to wring every last penny out of the draft, made a football nerd's dream into yet another exercise in league supremacy.
The National Football League entry draft starts a clean three weeks from today in prime time on either ESPN or the NFL Network, whichever group of analysts you prefer. For football fanatics such as myself, it is an oasis of meaningful football activity in the desert between the Super Bowl in early February and the first week of regular season football the weekend after Labor Day. I still look forward to the event with vigor and excitement. Not only do I get to wait with clenched asshole to see how my team is going to draft, I get to play armchair general manager with other teams. The NFL is the easiest league in the country in which an average schlub like me can sound smart because the feeder leagues are so high-profile. College football has its own multibillion dollar industry around it, and no players are more familiar to the fans of the professional leagues than the kids who knock around for 12 games a year plus bowls. It’s for this reason why the NFL Draft is considered the best. The NHL and MLB drafts feature players most people don’t follow, and the NBA Draft is top-heavy to the point where once you get out of the top five or six picks, you might as well be in the seventh round of the NFL’s.
For as much as I look forward to the draft though, it used to be better, like a whole lot better. I spent the last two days here on this newsletter telling you that things are better now than they were when I was growing up, but the NFL Draft is a clear example of a thing where I can and will yell at someone to get off my lawn. The target entity in this case is the league itself. The draft used to be a wonderful weekend excursion for football nerds like myself to stay inside on an early spring day to indulge in excitement, in schadenfreude, in football. There’s a reason why guys like Mel Kiper, Jr. shouldn’t be let out of their dungeons any other time of the year, and it’s the same reason why the draft itself is not a prime time event.
Yet, the league, in its ever-expanding quest to make even more money than the ungodly sums it already pulls in, ruined the entire mystique of the draft by taking it from its two-day, weekends only perch, and plopping the first round on prime time on a Thursday night. They also moved it from the second week in April to the end of the month in an attempt to draw out more interest, as if the Draft Industrial Complex that in the age of information churns every day, all year ever rests or needs two extra weeks to gestate to fully manifest. Much like no two people can agree on when Metallica sold out, only that they did sell out, you will find massive disagreements on when the draft went from being nerd heaven to yet another chance for the league to wring money out of its sponsors. The original draft wasn’t televised and held in smoky rooms with team owners and GMs getting their picks up to the commissioner in workmanlike fashion for players who may not have even wanted to play in the league. The first ever draft pick in league history, Jay Berwanger, never played a down in the league and instead went pro in something else. Was televising the draft the ruin point? Or was it when ESPN decided to add production values to the ceremony? Moving the event from a random auditorium to Radio City Music Hall? Taking the draft on the road? There are several points in time where you could find people saying the draft was ruined. For me, it was when Roger Goodell and the league owners decided to take it prime time.
However, it was always going to trend this way. Football is not some niche interest like pro wrestling. It’s so big and omnipresent that the league, being a tried-and-true capitalist entity, has always felt the duty to make every aspect of it as available to as many people as possible with as much pomp and circumstance behind it and as many sponsors spraying money at it at full capacity. There’s absolutely no way the league was going to sit idly by and allow the kickoff of the first showcase of its newest star athletes begin at noon a Saturday. People are still sleeping or eating brunch! You can’t maximize viewers that way, and the league’s hyping of the draft had already reached fever pitch by the advent of the Internet age. If anything, the draft event itself had lagged behind where the league’s Draft Industrial Complex had placed it. The journalists and analysts doing mock drafts, the scouting combine, the innumerable pro days, and all the pre-draft reporting on the top prospects really demanded that the move be made, and now that the Internet has made information so ready to disseminate, the sheer number of data points that the general public is exposed to may actually be radioactive at this point.
For being the most popular sporting league in America (although I gather the NBA is gaining steam behind it), the NFL is mighty insecure about its place in the pantheon. The league needs to have a steady stream of information flowing from it in order to stay at the top of the conversation at all times. Why else do you think teams started making trades before the end of the league year in mid-March? Or why the league has a “legal tampering” period where teams can contact free agents before the official beginning of free agency? The NFL has the fewest games of any of the major four sports leagues spread out across the shortest span on the calendar. In order to stay relevant among leagues that are actually playing games, the league and its media partners have to manufacture stories to keep football relevant and fresh in everyone’s minds, as if the league would shrink and vanish if no one were talking about it.
So we, the nerds, having our own weekend to ourselves where we could bathe in the most detailed intricacies of the league was never going to remain that quaint little event where we’d have ESPN on the TV all day Saturday and Sunday to tense up over players falling, revel in players’ outrageous outfits, or collectively laugh at how mad Jets fans would get without fail at whomever their team selected. All that experience almost commanded to be blown up with all the pageantry and fake ceremony that comes with slapping non-game action on prime time. What I’m saying is, it was never meant to be ours.
Everything would still be okay if the draft didn’t turn into an analytics-driven competition to see who can get the best quarterback for the cheapest price so they could “compete” for a title while they’re on their rookie contract. It used to be that rookies could make comparative salaries to their veteran brethren coming out of school. The league saw that they could further depress costs for their owners and pretend like they gave a shit about fair pay for league veterans, so they instituted a “rookie cap” on salaries. It took the agita out of negotiating with a rookie draft pick out of college, but gone were the days when you had to pay a young player an eight-figure signing bonus before they took a snap.
Before that time, quarterbacks were put at a premium, but outside of anomalous classes such as 1983 and 1999, they were taken commensurate with their position among draft prospects. Some years, there were two elite-graded quarterbacks at the top of a draft, like with Ryan Leaf and Peyton Manning, or Drew Bledsoe and Rick Mirer. Whether or not they panned out is another question altogether, because the draft is never a sure thing. That’s why no one has ever consistently mastered it over the years. Some teams and general managers like Ozzie Newsome when he was in Baltimore had sterling draft records. Others, like the Cleveland Browns most of the last two decades or so have had abysmal records. However, no team is perfect, and few general managers who have lasted more than a few years have totally stinky draft records. While I wouldn’t say I believe the draft is a total crapshoot anymore, there’s still more uncertainty than people like Kiper or Draft Twitter know-it-alls like Matt Miller or Scott Kacsmar would have you believe. But that’s beside the point.
There was a time in the 90s when the draft was truly unpredictable. Anyone could go first overall, like a running back (Ki-Jana Carter, 1995), a defensive tackle (Russell Maryland, 1991), or a wide receiver (Keyshawn Johnson, 1996). By the time you got to 2001, people started to realize that the game changed, and that quarterback was not only the most important position on the field, but it was the key to everything. Only five non-quarterbacks have been selected first overall in the draft since 2001, and all five of those players were adjacent to the quarterback, position in some way. Two of those picks were offensive tackles, a position prided for how it protects the quarterback, and three were pass rushing defensive ends, the most premium position on defense for the purpose of stopping the other team’s quarterback. With the advent these rookie contracts, the risk of having to tie up a significant chunk of your cap in a bad QB has significantly gone down. Additionally, as seen with the trades of both quarterbacks taken at the top of the 2016 Draft, teams aren’t afraid to blow up their salary caps after extending those players in order to chase the dragon of having an affordable upgrade at quarterback. The idea of a cost-controlled player at the QB position is more in sync with what the Eagles did trading Carson Wentz, because the Rams traded Jared Goff for Matthew Stafford, a veteran who at one time was the highest paid player in the league. Still, players are seen not as people, but as fungible assets. If that sounds gross to you, that’s because it is. Front offices in every sport are like this, so it’s not a NFL thing exclusively. However, if quarterback is the most important position on the field, shouldn’t it be paid like that, no matter what? Teams have already used analytics to freeze out the running back position and significantly depress average pay there. It’s all about finding ways to cut costs.
Therefore, you’re never going to see a draft like 1996 again, when the first quarterback taken overall was in the second round. For the record, that guy was Tony Banks, who had a decent career with his original team, the then-St. Louis Rams. He’s also the best player in NFL history to share a name with a member of Genesis. If the dynamics of the league were then as they are today, Banks would’ve been taken in round 1, maybe even first overall. That’s how much emphasis people put on having a cost-controlled quarterback. Mac Jones would probably carry a third round grade in a sane system, but he’s going to be drafted third overall by the San Francisco 49ers as is heavily rumored. If he doesn’t land there, he probably won’t make it past Denver at 9. The league is probably getting to the point where a player like Russell Wilson or Dak Prescott lasting until the third round before being taken is a thing of the past. This beautiful anomaly was always too perfect and pure to last.
Still, much like Donald Trump with Coke…
…I’m still going to be in front of my television on Thursday, April 29, when the NFL draft kicks off. I will watch in rapt attention as the Jacksonville Jaguars are on the clock, even if everyone knows they’re taking Trevor Lawrence. I will be hopeful for the Eagles to take a wide receiver but then end up trading back again to take an undersized pass rusher from the Mid-American Conference while all three other teams in the NFC East draft stud Southeastern Conference players. It’s a habit I can’t quit, and it’s still fun to watch Jets fans lose their shit when they draft the “wrong” player, even if now they have to show them at draft parties from a location satellite to where the actual draft is taking place.
Whom do you want your team to draft? Leave a comment!
I guess the important lesson is that even if capitalism ends up causing innovation that ends up improving something, that innovation will never, ever be enough to satiate the people disproportionately making money from it. The NFL Draft is a prime example of this line of thinking. Hell, the NFL OVERALL is a prime example of it, continually adding more games to the slate to jack up game revenue. Last year, it was expanding the playoffs. This year, it’s adding a 17th game to each team’s regular season schedule. When is enough enough? Maybe the real question is, when will too much be enough to drive saps like me away? The answer to that question is murky, because it’s not like the NFL is the only entity inflating and inflating, testing the limits of the bubble they’re blowing up. There might be an answer somewhere that most people may not like, but I’ll let the people smarter than me in those things answer them. For now, I’ll continue watching the NFL, the games, the draft, everything, because I’m a credulous sap who needs something to dull the pain of everyday life, no matter how much that analgesic degrades over time.
If the Dolphins draft Harris and Pitts in the first round I am going to throw a cheesesteak at your house in celebration