The NFL Draft may be on three different networks this year, but only ESPN can claim to have a history with the event that turned it into what it is today.
“We don’t usually like to brag about things,” ESPN Vice President of Production Seth Markman told The Athletic. “But this is one event that we feel like we created, we’ve innovated along the way, and we’ve been in lockstep with the NFL every year on how to make this bigger and better.”
This will be the fifth year that ABC and NFL Network will have their own presentations of the Draft. Markman didn’t say how his unit feels about the competition for eyeballs, but he did say that in the past, ESPN employees have been territorial about the event.
“It’s one of the few events that I would say is in the DNA of ESPN. A few years back, FOX was involved as well, and I’ll be honest with you, it pissed people off here. It was one of the few things that we were like, ‘No, no, no, no, we do the NFL Drafts. That’s our event.’”
As a week of programming, the NFL Draft delivers for ESPN in a way that few other sporting events do. Markman notes that while the Super Bowl itself is huge, it does not tend to generate the kind of viewership for the week leading up to the game that the Draft does.
Everyone has a theory about why that is. Markman says it is about hope. Mel Kiper Jr. says it is about anticipation. Phil Simms of CBS told Front Office Sports that it is actually about Kiper.
“I want to hear Mel Kiper. I’m not going there to hear eight other guys,” he said. “I want to hear Mel Kiper’s take — because this is what he does year-round.”
He added that the other theories do hold water. There is also the fantasy GM angle of second-guessing what each team should do, but Simms’s praise of Kiper is evidence that ESPN is truly engrained in the NFL Draft. The event isn’t just in the network’s DNA. ESPN is in the DNA of the NFL Draft, too.
