Photo: Gregory Shamus/Getty Images
People watch sports for all sorts of reasons. There’s the thrill of competition. The visceral, kinetic excitement of watching history unfold in real time. The wonder of watching human beings extend the limits of what is physically possible. Geographic loyalty and pride. Escapism. Nostalgia. Boredom. Gambling. I cycle between all these myself — I get to toss in “professional obligation” too — but there’s nothing inherently wrong, or illogical, about any of them. I am not going to harsh anyone’s mellow: You do you.
But I have to ask a question I’ve been pondering my entire adult life. I ask with sincerity, curiosity and legitimate bewilderment:
Why the hell does anyone watch the NFL Draft?
Lord knows, I understand why so many people watch the NFL. (The league was responsible for 72 of the 100 most-watched television programs last year, a number that will only go up in 2025 — unfortunately not a presidential election year.) But the ubiquity of the NFL Draft, which begins Thursday night in Green Bay, remains staggering to me. What was once a sleepy, bureaucratic event where old white men in fedoras sat in a dark room and smoked cigarettes while making their picks by marking them on a chalkboard is now one of the signature events on the sports calendar. Its seven rounds now span a full three days, and the NFL and Green Bay have estimated roughly 250,000 people will travel to freezing Wisconsin to sit in a parking lot outside a football stadium where there is, in fact, no football being played. If you have paid even passing attention to sports over the last month, you will have seen more coverage and promotion of the NFL Draft than the first month of the MLB season, the NBA and NHL Playoffs, and college sports’ various transfer portals. It’s the lead story on ESPN and CBS Sports right now, and it probably will be every second until the draft is over. There is a person on ESPN.com who, I swear to God, has actually projected all 257 picks in the draft, which is a little bit like trying to predict how many puppies a dog your great-grandchild will adopt 60 years from now is likely to have.
This blanket-the-airwaves approach comes despite a simple, fundamental fact about the NFL Draft, which is that it is, to steal an old homily from the Quakers, as boring as boiled shit. To watch the NFL Draft is to fathom what those guys in fedoras implicitly understood all those years ago: There is absolutely nothing worth watching. The NFL Draft isn’t just a committee meeting: It’s a long, slow reading of an Excel document. It is more than 12 hours of people walking up to a podium and saying a name of a person you do not know, a person you will almost certainly forget about in a matter of minutes. The players whose names are read will not suit up immediately; you will not see them in uniform for five months, if you ever see them at all. Most of these players are not even at the draft. They are just lines on a spreadsheet. And this will go on for days. It is not just not football; it is not even an actual activity.
And yet this thing dominates the calendar for sports fans every spring. There are draft parties, there are countdown clocks, there are, yes, 250,000 people hanging out in a parking lot in Green Bay.
I ask again: Why? What is wrong with you people?
Part of the draft’s ubiquity is just about the ubiquity of the NFL itself. The Draft is the first official league event after the Super Bowl, and the final one until Training Camp starts. It’s the single offseason event in which the league infiltrates public consciousness. In many ways, the Draft is like an old house ad in a newspaper, or self-promotional commercial pointing toward future programming: A way to remind viewers that, someday, not long from now, there will be something you actually want to watch. This is partly the job of any league’s draft, of course: the promise of future entertainment. People may tune in just to see their team’s logo, or to simulate tailgate experiences awaiting them in the fall. There is also a certain historic element involved. Patrick Mahomes’ highlight reel at his eventual Hall of Fame induction ceremony will doubtless kick off with footage of him shaking commissioner Roger Goodell’s hand at the 2017 Draft. A new player on your team represents hope, a moment of pure possibility before the ugly realities of real life set in. (It should be said, though, that it’s rarely the game-changing quarterback like Mahomes; usually it’s a lineman whose name you’ve only recently heard of and now are pouring all your hopes into). Finally, there’s the fantasy football-esque wheeling and dealing aspect of things. It can be exciting when Adam Schefter shows up and starts talking about a trade.
But all that is still a pretty thin reed on which to pin 12 hours of your spring weekend. To my eyes, there have been three actual interesting things to ever happen at the NFL Draft. The first was in 2014, when SEC Defensive Player of the Year Michael Sam kissed his boyfriend on camera after the then-St. Louis Rams selected him in the seventh round. (It speaks poorly to the devolution of American culture that we’d probably handle this scene less maturely now than we did 11 years ago.) The second was in 2016, when a video of offensive tackle Laremy Tunsil smoking weed out of a gas mask was posted to his Twitter account on Draft Night, making it onto telecast and causing him to drop nearly all the way out of the first round. (Tunsil turned out to be a great player who used the incident as motivation; the whole thing is a reminder how jumpy NFL executives really are.) The third was the entire 2020 Draft, which was held during the first wave of COVID, when it looked like sports could be years from returning. That draft gave us rare insights into the lives (and homes) of powerful NFL figures (including Bill Belichick’s dog) and may have served as the moment that Goodell turned public opinion back in his favor, against all odds at the time.
And… that’s it. Otherwise it’s really just the listing of a bunch of names: the ultimate This Could Have Been An Email event. And yet it continues to dominate our entire sports culture for weeks at a time. It is possible I am worrying too much about this. After all, NFL Draft television ratings aren’t really that high; none of those top-100 rated television shows last year was the Draft, and the numbers have actually fallen for a couple of years now. And it would be a surprise for this year’s edition to buck that trend; there are fewer marquee quarterbacks in the mix this year than usual, and the one that’s expected to go first, Miami’s Cam Ward to the Titans, was not a particularly bold-faced name in college football.
But still. There are three NBA playoff games on Thursday night — including Game Three of the Knicks-Pistons series — as well as the Stanley Cup playoffs, baseball games, Adolescence, Andor and the promise of a lovely spring night. The center of the sports world will be guys in overstuff suits reading names off a note card for 12 hours. I know people watch. I should finally just admit: I will never understand why.
