I’ve decided to forgo the regular formatting this week to talk about the most sick of sicko sporting “events”, the NFL Draft. In case you are not familiar, if you aren’t congratulations on the ability to still feel the light of god on your face, the NFL Draft is a now (jesus fucking christ) three-day blowout in which NFL teams pick players out of the college ranks to join their teams and sacrifice their bodies so men can get angry and call other men who are on the radio or I guess have something to talk about on podcasts that aren’t about TV or politics or uncovering some secret history or true crime or gossip or science bullshit or whatever. I’ve been a disgusting little Draft piggie since I was a kid, this was the unfortunate side effect of being a fan of the at-that-time terrible Seattle Seahawks. I used to make my parents buy me the giant Street and Smith’s draft guide every year and I’d lay it out along with mock drafts published by the various newspapers we’d get (Seattle Times, Seattle PI (RIP), New York Times) on the living room floor waiting for the Seahawks to pick those one or two or three players that would turn them from a bunch of silver helmeted doofuses to the Super Bowl Champions that I could cherish. I would watch this intently despite the fact that it was just, at its heart, an old dude reading off names every fifteen minutes or so with guys shouting about it in between. It was pretty weird and baroque back then, now it’s so much more.
The draft used to be held annually in Radio City Music Hall (I even went to the final one there and even wrote about it for one of the many online publications that ceased producing new work not too long after I wrote for them, luckily for everyone on Substack this is merely a “platform”) but now occurs in a different NFL city every year. With that movement has come a kind of carnival aspect, the cities go all out (which I’m sure involves some sort of tax break, traffic problems, and the need to find a local cover band who’s willing to play for at least 16 hours over the course of the weekend), the fans go all out (which definitely involves day drinking, facepaint, and some very obscure jersey wearing), and unfortunately “the media” also goes all out. Then again “the media” is a pretty strange animal when it comes to the NFL Draft.
In the faraway past “the media” was pretty much the aforementioned newspapers, a few magazines, ESPN, and maybe a little bit of local TV station coverage but now the NFL chattering class has spread like some sort of toxic algae. During the season, when the games are actually happening, the ratio of “expert” talk to actual on-field action is akin to that of a presidential campaign but somehow that ratio INCREASES during draft season. I try to break up this firehouse of unfounded bullshit three ways. There are the actual NFL “insiders”, lickspittles who dole out info they’ve sold their souls for often are just smokescreens to sew disinformation and gain leverage. The best delivery system for these types is the written word (though some insiders even have problems with that), seeing their faces and hearing them speak are unfortunate side effects of any sports fanery. Then there are the commentators who crunch tape and try to project what a prospect who played in college might do in the pros with only limited knowledge of both said prospect and the structure of the teams they might end up with. Some of these people are good and smart and funny and make listening to them a joy, a good rule of thumb is the less commentator talks about “betting lines” and what “Vegas is saying” the better your experience is going to be. THEN there are the team site bloggers/serial mock drafters, one layer below that, who try to synthesize this already damaged information into clickbait-ey “stories” oftentimes just sending out reactions to OTHER mock drafts from people further up the information pipeline. These people are OCCASIONALLY good and sometimes evolve, pokemon-like, into good commentators but most of them write with a style and syntax that would make whatever I’m doing here seem like freaking Haruki Murakami. THEN way down at the bottom of all of this is the freshest hell that the collective NFL media has visited upon us, the various Mock Draft Simulators.
I noticed these a couple of years ago, I think the Pro Football Network one was the first I tried out, and at first, they seemed like a fun way to try to guess how the draft was going to go, soon however it became clear that this was it, the end of draft talk. Various other websites have trotted this service out over the last couple of years with one even having the audacity to make you pay for it and with each one’s arrival I feel like I get dumber. These Simulators offer nothing, are based on nothing (well I mean they’re based on something but there is no proof of what), and provide nothing, they are the emptiest calorie of draft information. I’ve run tons of these things (yes this part is a me problem) and each one makes me more and more depressed (again, kind of a me problem) but what’s worse is I see these things used for articles BY other people in the media ecosystem laid out above! WHAT? I know draft talk always ends up being some ouroboros of takes but adding this isn’t the snake eating its tail instead the snake is eating the shit that’s coming out of the tail (I’m not sure I landed this analogy).
ANYWAY! The NFL draft is tonight! And you can watch it on three networks (wha?)! I’ll be at work but I hope the Seahawks take Jalen Carter!