Now that the dust has settled on the most interesting NFL Draft of my lifetime, I thought it was the right time for a little reflection. For many, the Draft is one of the best times of the year. Every team is involved, and if your team had a bad season, you have reason to be interested for the first time in months.
Every part of the experience can be fun for fans. In February, the Combine inspires dreams about the wide receiver who just ran a 4.3 second 40 yard dash suiting up for your team in the fall. In March, free agency breathes new life into the mock drafts we’ve been reading all year long. Finally in April, the Draft arrives, with its own twists and turns in the form of surprise selections and trades we never saw coming.
Even after all that, however, there’s still one last part of the Draft to enjoy – the reaction. Fans from across the NFL devour twitter, podcasts, and articles, hungry for words of approval from anyone with a platform.
The only thing more prevalent than draft reaction this year, however, was ridicule from pundits and purists about the idiocy of draft grades, and, more importantly, those that consume them.
The most common criticism of said grades is the obvious fact that no one knows how good any of the players taken are going to be in the NFL. This, of course, is one hundred percent true.
It’s also true, however, that if we only talked about things we knew for sure, the sports media world would look a lot different. There are many other things we do every year and even every week during the season that are equally “pointless,” by the same standard. Every preseason begins with the entire sports media world predicting the playoff teams months ahead of time. Every NFL pregame show ends with hosts picking winners from that week’s games, despite the fact that no one can pick games in any reliable way. Why are those things (and many others) spared from criticism?
There is a very simple reason so much time and energy are devoted to draft evaluations – people love them. They’re almost never accurate, they’re not based on anything concrete, and they provide absolutely no value as soon as training camp starts. They’re McDonald’s, basically. The thing is, last I checked, McDonald’s sells billions of hamburgers.
When hosts and writers diminish one of the most popular pieces people consume, they belittle their audience for enjoying them. How much sense does that make? What is the point of racking your brain for creative things to write and say only to chase people away when they come to enjoy them? When you go into McDonald’s to order a Big Mac, does the person behind the counter tell you to order a salad instead? Of course not. They ask if you’d like to supersize it for a dollar more.
We in sports media will never survive trying to be the parent forcing their kid to eat her vegetables. It works (sometimes) as a parent because your kid doesn’t have any other options for dinner. When it comes to your column, podcast, or broadcast, however, the alternative options are endless.
You don’t distinguish yourself as a show by talking about things most people don’t care about. You distinguish yourself with how you address the topic everyone does care about. As content providers, it is up to us to evaluate a teams’ draft in a way that is palatable to both the creators and the consumers of the product.
Rob ‘Stats’ Guerrera is a former columnist for BSM. He has worked as a national radio/TV/podcast producer with the biggest names in the industry on ESPN, NBCSN and DirecTV. Among those he’s worked with include Mike Greenberg, Mike Golic, Colin Cowherd, Dan Patrick, Scott Van Pelt, Ryen Russillo, Mike Florio, Mike Tirico, Kay Adams, and Erik Kuselias. You can find him on Twitter @StatsOnFire or reach him by email at RFGuerrera@gmail.com.
