The great day has arrived, at last. And how have we ever managed to endure waiting to learn who will be selected in the first round of the National Football League’s annual draft of college players? By 7:55 p.m. ET on Thursday, the tension will have become well nigh unbearable. And then, the announcement will be made. “With the No. 1 selection in the first round, the Cleveland Browns take …”
As a media moment, it bears comparison to the Academy Awards and the announcement of Best Picture. Well, not exactly. That Oscar-winning film will have already been a hit while the first pick in the NFL draft—especially since he will be the choice of the Cleveland Browns—might turn out to be a total bust. Someone whose name will be mentioned alongside that of, oh, Johnny Manziel. Cleveland used a second pick in the first round of 2014 on Manziel, a Heisman Trophy winner who went on to party himself right out of the NFL. They don’t give Oscars to films that are still in development.
Still, the fans love the draft. They must. Else, why would ESPN devote so much airtime and star power to broadcasting the event live. From Philadelphia this year, as it happens, so the references to Rocky will surely be repeated ad nauseam along with frequent showings of Sylvester Stallone running up the marble stairs of the Museum of Art and raising his arms in triumph as he reaches the top.
The buildup to the draft has been in the works for weeks now. Experts have studied the teams and their needs and matched this information against the available talent and the likelihood of this player or that one still being available when it becomes the turn of this franchise or that to make its pick. There are many moving parts … variables, as they say. And, then, there are the intangibles. Should a team that clearly needs help at running back use its pick to take someone who might be the best player at the position but who also once punched a woman with enough force to break her jaw? With, for good measure, the assault recorded on video? Hard question and one that has consumed lots of copy—digital and print—in recent days. And we won’t really know the answer to that question, after all, until a team does draft that player (as, surely, some franchise will) and we learn whether he can gain, consistently, more than 1,000 yards a season. Meanwhile, though, the question has provided vast amounts of fuel for the incendiary arguments that consume much of the oxygen on sports broadcasting these days.
And, then, the draft is really just one vast hypothetical. Which team will trade up or down in order to get a specific player or to increase the size of its haul. Should a team draft for need or take the best available player? This one is a perennial; the debate that never ends. The free will vs. determinism of pro-football theology. Then, of course, there is the matter of how to determine the relative desirability of the players. Everything is measured. How tall, how heavy, how fast, how agile, how smart. Players are tested for, among other things, their speed at something called a “three cone drill.” Lately, the size of a player’s hands has come to be considered critical information, especially among quarterbacks and receivers. Players’ backgrounds are examined closely, including their cyberspace pastimes. Somewhere in the organizational structure of an NFL team, there is a person responsible for following a bunch of college jocks on Facebook and Twitter.
So the draft is heaven for the compulsive data-miners among sports fans … and there are millions of them. With sufficient study and the crunching of enough numbers, they believe, it is possible to prove that the Texans need to trade the 25th and 57th picks overall for the Redskins’ first round pick (17th overall), which Houston would use to take Deshaun Watson, the quarterback the team so plainly needs. After all, it is right there, in the data. But, then, Watson doesn’t put much velocity on the ball … a mere 49 mph where professional teams like to see 55 mph. So the analyzing goes on.
This data mining is addictive for those who followed the draft all the way to Philadelphia and that first, solemn pick. (Who will, by the way, almost certainly be Myles Garrett, a defensive lineman out of Texas A&M.) Imagine the satisfaction of seeing the 16th pick turn out to be exactly the player you’d said it should be.
But there is satisfaction, in time, for the old-fashioned sports fan who tends to prefer watching games to listening to loudmouth rants by data-stuffed analysts. It comes with the proof of how wise the teams have turned out to be with their picks.
This is when the No. 1 pick, after a couple of indifferent seasons, is traded and then released. Happens all the time. Especially with Cleveland. Must be something in the water of Lake Erie. In the 2011 draft, the Browns traded the sixth overall pick to Atlanta in return for five from the Falcons: three in that draft and two in 2012. The Falcons used their pick to select Julio Jones, arguably the best receiver in football. The Browns used the five picks they got from Atlanta to take Trent Richardson, Brandon Weeden, Phil Taylor, Greg Little, and Owen Marecic. None of whom ever made much of what is called an “impact.”
But it isn’t just Cleveland. There are all manner of great stories about the fallibility of the experts doing the drafting. Even people who don’t know football know that Tom Brady was the 199th player taken in the 2000 draft. Quarterbacks selected ahead of him included Chad Pennington, Giovanni Carmazzi, Chris Redman, Tee Martin, Marc Bulger, and Spergon Wynn. You remember them, don’t you?
Even the New England Patriots, the smartest organization in all of sports, didn’t think Tom Brady was worth any more than a sixth-round choice that year. So, we will know, in the fullness of time, what to think about this year’s draft. As for this week … nothing to see here, fans. Just Rocky running up those steps and we’ve all seen that a million times.
