The first round of the NFL draft was last night, and one of the more difficult things that I've had to do in my 30 years on earth is to continue to justify it's existence. That's a little bit of hyperbole, I guess, since grad school wasn't a walk in the park and passing a kidney stone at some point in the future will probably be pretty rough, but I would gladly go through either of those experiences rather than be a would-be professional athlete who's expected to go through the insane rigmarole that is the NFL Draft and Combine. ...Maybe not the kidney stone.
Regardless, as an outside observer I can do nothing but watch in abject horror as young football playing men in the prime of their lives are subject to the most ridiculous inanities that ESPN and the NFL can come up with, agonizingly spread out over the course of several months. The draft starts out as a nice little retrospective of college football careers, as we're reminded of all the neat things that guys like Marcus Mariota and Melvin Gordon accomplished, but then evolves into this multi-day were-beast of an event that involves a lot of sweaty men in suits yelling at a camera for hours and hours and hours.
Still, if there are any future NFL draftees reading this (and why wouldn't they want to read some Hot Takes from a guy with barely enough coordination to play Putt Putt), it's important that I give both sides of the coin adequate consideration. That necessarily calls for a good ol' fashioned pros and cons list, which will also make this post considerably easier to write. So, you know, win/win.
PROS OF BEING DRAFTED
- Get to be on TV, which is kind of cool
- Probably free food somewhere
- You get a neat jersey with your name on it
- Might make some money, I guess
CONS OF BEING DRAFTED
Literally everything else.
- The Wonderlic
Let's talk about the Wonderlic for a second. If you're not familiar with what it is, exactly, it's a 50 question test where you have 12 minutes to answer as many questions as you can correctly. It's a fairly okay test of overall "intellectual functioning," but beyond that it's pretty much nothing, which is of course exactly why the NFL has decided to pepper players with questions like
"When a rope is selling 20 cents per 2 feet, how many feet can you buy for 30 dollars?"
to determine if they can intercept a pass or throw a block or whatever. If you score well, congrats, you have won the lamest pissing contest in the universe and no one will care. Bomb it, and teams get to put another strike against you to go along with your arms being 3/8ths of an inch too short. Frank Gore for a 6 on this dumb thing and he's one of the best running backs in 49ers history. Donovan McNabb got a 14 and he's a Hall of Famer. Blaine Gabbert got a 42 and he's hot garbage. The Wonderlic is 2015 NFL phrenology, but if it gives teams one more BS metric to evaluate players on, they're gonna keep using it.
- The Interviews
NFL draftee interviews are the dumbest things in the world. And look; I enjoy interviewing and being interviewed. When you're talking with a potential employer or trying to figure out a new employee, it's a good way to get inside the other person's head to see what they're thinking. I'm a kind of guy who really wants to be understood, especially by the people that I work for, so for me an interview is a good way to do that.
That's not really what an NFL interview is designed to do though. Instead, these interviews are conducted by people who think they're living out a second round of the Stanford Prison Experiment. A lot of the asked questions were are are absolutely insane, but my favorite that I've seen is definitely "How many different things can you think of that you can do with a paper clip?" because I am 100000% sure that some dumbass in the Browns' front office saw that question in a management guidebook from RadioShack and went "HAH, this'll get 'em!" and then asked it of like 50 different football players. Interviews are only worthwhile if the interviewer isn't a complete idiot.
- You have to touch Roger Goodell
Ewww.
- Mel Kiper and company picking apart your game like it was a roaster chicken in front of Chris Berman
If you're really, really, really good at something, I imagine that it's pretty aggravating to watch noted airborne pathogens like Mel Kiper and Todd McShay tear apart your game on a weekly basis leading up to the biggest moment in your life. I mean, I have to imagine what that's like because I'm not good enough at anything in my own personal life to be able to compare it to anything like that, but let's put it this way: you're Marcus Mariota. You're a Heisman winner, born leader, national championship runner up (haha yeah he is, high five!), you have impeccable collegiate credentials, and as a reward for all your hard work, a dude who looks like a bird and his full Windsor knot enthusiast arch-nemesis will yell at each other from January through April about how your mechanics suck.
And the worst part about it is that you have to play along. Kiper and McShay and Berman and even Gruden are all talking out of their asses a good 65% of the time, but if you don't kowtow to their narrative all of a sudden your Wonderlic scores get leaked and Mike and Mike start wondering loudly if you've got an attitude problem.
@Johnny11W "They already have the sons of anarchy in New York." -Gruden What does that even mean?
— Matt Regimbal (@mattreg3) May 1, 2015
I actually don't know, Matt! These people are crazy.
- Suzie Kolber will do everything in her power to make you cry
See, to justify the ridiculous pomp and circumstance of the now three days of apparently necessary draft coverage, it's got to be about more than just an excuse to boo Roger Goodell for three and a half hours. As fun as that exercise is, it's not quite enough to justify renting out half of Chicago, so ESPN turned to one Suzie Kolber to wring whatever tears she could from the eyes of grown men who probably don't want to recount the worst events of their lives during the happiest event of their lives.
“So, your grandma got run over, on Christmas, by a reindeer. Now you’re getting drafted, How has that horrible accident helped you?"
— Jeremy Birmingham (@Birm) May 1, 2015
Yeah, sorry Birm, Suzie is going to get her pound of flesh one way or another, and if that means bringing up dead siblings or dire poverty, she will do that in half a heartbeat.
- The fans that go are actual psychopaths who might kill you
"Well I only get 10 vacation days a year, better spend two of them drunker than anyone has ever been, wearing nothing but red and gold bodypaint and yelling obscenities at 22 year olds!"
-The subject of an upcoming Werner Herzog documentary
- None of it matters anyway
Jameis Winston, a person who is at best a giant immature dumbass who threw 18 interceptions last year and at worst a possible sex offender thief who threw 18 interceptions last year, still got drafted first yesterday. A mountain of evidence that shows this guy is a maroon of the highest order is still not enough to push him out of the top spot because the NFL is, above all else, obsessed with metrics and "potential."
As long as Winston didn't actually kill someone, there's very little that a successful six foot four QB from a Power 5 conference could do to not be celebrated by the media companies whose job it is to create narratives that allow for said celebration on those same media companies. And even in the case of a murder accusation, hell, that might land you a booth position after your career is over. The NFL is gonna do what the NFL is gonna do, logic and morals but especially logic be damned.
There is still two more days of this thing, as ESPN and the NFL Network wring blood from the football shaped stone that is the NFL Draft. It's going to continue to be ludicrous, way too long, and way too invasive for the duration, but that's what the viewers want and by God that's what they're gonna get.
Look, I would do a lot of things for tens of millions of dollars, and I understand that these are dudes who make a hilarious amount of money to play a game. But they also are putting their bodies and minds at risk for our entertainment, so maybe we could treat future NFL players with slightly more dignity than they're being afforded by the dictates of the NFL and the media.
