Peter King: The 2014 NFL Draft - Sealed With a Kiss

[Prime Time]

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The 2014 NFL Draft: Sealed With a Kiss
From Johnny Manziel's long wait on Thursday to Michael Sam's dramatic moment on Saturday, this year's NFL draft will go down in history. Plus, an NFC GM continues his trade prowess and a Ram infiltrates the Falcons' draft room
By Peter King

Read the entire article at the link.

Rams mentions:

Where do you start after a weekend like this? Choose one:

1. The Michael Sam saga, which couldn’t have been more dramatic if the Coen brothers had scripted it.

My pick: Sam. An emotional, cool, explosive moment, with Sam getting the call from Rams GM Les Snead telling him he’d been drafted with the 249th pick. “Man, was he emotional,” Snead said Sunday morning. “I could feel it over the phone.” Snead handed the phone to coach Jeff Fisher, with Sam tearing up and slowly, slowly, slow folding over and weeping, his male partner there to comfort him.

On national TV. It’s a scene we haven’t seen in American TV history (and certainly not in American sports history), thankfully running unedited and uninterrupted by ESPN. And then Sam kissed the man. The world is changing, and the Rams and Sam and the NFL and ESPN made a seminal moment of it Saturday. If you think that moment of Sam bending over and audibly weeping isn’t going to be replayed scores of times for sporting and societal reasons, you’re wrong. Way wrong.

“I could feel the pivot in history at that moment, with that phone call,’’ Snead said.

Late Saturday night, after the Rams finished signing their undrafted free agents, Fisher and COO Kevin Demoff sat in the coach’s office and read through the messages and Tweets of support. They read these words from President Obama: “From the playing field to the corporate boardroom, LGBT Americans prove everyday that you should be judged by what you do and not who you are.” And this Tweet from Ellen Degeneres: “So proud of the @STLouisRams for showing there’s nothing to be afraid of.” And this from singer John Legend: “Congratulation to Michael Sam. It’s a victory for love.” And this from former Saint and current ALS beacon Steve Gleason: “Great moment in US sports history.”

Fisher and Demoff were moved by the reaction. “It was a reminder of the power of the NFL,” Demoff said, “and how we could use the power for something good.”

“I wish I could have digested it and take it all in,” said Snead. “I’ve never been part of a decision that brought people to tears. But I couldn’t really embrace the moment, because we were so close to the end of the draft, and we had to mute the TV so we could get going on our undrafted free-agent class.”

Sam will have a huge task ahead of him. Want the good news? Of the 53 men on St. Louis’ opening-day roster last year, 18 entered the league undrafted, and another three were seventh-round picks. And new defensive coordinator Gregg Williams loves the desperate underdog; a seventh-rounder on any roster is an underdog. The bad news: Incumbent ends Robert Quinn and Chris Long are franchise cornerstones, and sub William Hayes is a productive rusher. Those three are set in stone. There will be either one or two more defensive ends kept, and Sam was the only one drafted. It won’t help Sam that he probably won’t be a good special-teams player because his mediocre flexibility and quick-twitch movement. He’ll have to star in camp and the preseason as what Snead labels the “DPR”—designated pass-rusher.

But he’ll have a chance. And the Rams are perhaps the best spot for him. It’s two hours from where he went to school, and the media is largely friendly, and wherever he went Wolf Blitzer or Anderson Cooper would have been part of the early days of training camp. The Rams know it, and Jeff Fisher can handle it. I will be surprised if Sam’s fate with the Rams is determined on anything other than whether he can be productive rushing the passer.
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War room visitor of the week.

The son of St. Louis GM Les Snead, Logan Snead, is a buddy of Max Blank (son of Falcons owner Arthur) in seventh grade in Atlanta. So Logan got invited to spend draft night in the Falcons’ draft room with Max on Thursday, and he wore tan slacks and a sharp blue shirt—Ram colors—for the evening.

Interesting: The son of the Rams’ GM inside another team’s draft room. Snead, of course, used to work for Falcons GM Thomas Dimitroff, and the two men are good friends.

“Hey Logan,” Dimitroff said to the boy at one point, “you kidding me with the gold and blue clothes?”

“I’m quietly repping the Rams,” Logan said.
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“With the 249th pick in the 2014 NFL draft, the St. Louis Rams select Michael Sam, defensive end, Missouri.”

—NFL vice president of game operations Mike Kensil, announcing a historic pick late in the draft on Saturday evening. Very good for Kensil, who is the ultimate loyal NFL soldier. Now, whenever history looks back on this moment, it will be Kensil’s voice and words that welcome the first openly gay player into the NFL.

“If it was A.J. McCarron and Katherine Webb kissing, no one would say anything. But we’ve been documenting the NFL draft for 35 years, and we’ve never seen anything like this. We’ve never seen a man and a man. My instincts were to just let it roll.”

—Veteran ESPN NFL producer Seth Markman, whose job it was to determine what pictures from the draft America got to see over the weekend, and who let the video of Michael Sam and his partner kissing run at length.
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a. Hey Mike Silver! Good choice, being in St. Louis! Why wasn’t I that smart?

 

[-X-]

The 2014 NFL Draft: Sealed With a Kiss

I was waiting for that one...

 

[Rams and Gators]

Also from the same article

“With the 13th pick in the 2014 NFL Draft,” Goodell says, “the St. Louis Rams select Aaron Donald, defensive tackle, Pittsburgh.”

Manziel does not like to let people see him sweat. He knew his every move on this night would be scrutinized closely. But the Rams passing on him hurt. Because now he thought he’d be in for a free-fall. He turned to Burkhardt, and sort of out of the side of his mouth, said this:

“E.B., we’re screwed.”

I asked him about this over the phone Saturday night, when he was back home in Texas for 24 hours of relaxation. “I did tell Erik that,” he said. “I felt that way, because there was so much uncertainty after that. I felt really good about St. Louis. My workout with them was great. They spent a lot of time getting to know me and researching me, and I did well when they put me on the board with coach [offensive coordinator Brian] Schottenheimer. So yes, I have to admit, I was a little surprised there when they passed on me.”

One last point about Manziel: Imagine if he’d been drafted by the Rams at 13. Imagine the TV trucks, news helicopters, and Ellen DeGeneres and Deion Sanders and Chris Berman and Brian Williams at a May practice to see Manziel and Michael Sam. I think Sam’s in a good spot. Sam plus Manziel would have caused ESPN, NFL Network, Access Hollywood and Outsports to open news bureaus in the shadow of the Gateway Arch. Not too conducive to learning one’s trade.

 

[Prime Time]

Also from the same article

I missed that one. Thanks for catching it.

 

[Alan]

I'm all in with the Sam pick and I'm glad he's on the team I just wish we weren'y talking about him so much. The good news here is that it's 100 times nbetter than talking about Manziel.

 

[iBruce]

The Manziel piece is interesting. Knew the Rams would do their due diligence on QBs, but to be so high? on Manziel then not take one till the 7th rd.

 

[jjab360]

The Manziel piece is interesting. Knew the Rams would do their due diligence on QBs, but to be so high? on Manziel then not take one till the 7th rd.

I found this tidbit from the Michael Silver piece to be interesting:

Even after drafting Donald, however, Fisher didn't abandon the dream of further upgrading his offensive line. As two more teams passed on Martin, Snead began working the phones, with the idea of acquiring a third top-20 pick. The parameters of a deal were discussed with the Ravens, who held the 17th pick; the Rams threw out the possibility of surrendering second- and third-round picks, along with next year's second-rounder, should Martin continue to fall.

Watching NFL Network's draft broadcast on the TV in his office, Fisher saw the Dallas Cowboys snag Martin with the 16th pick, rendering the Ravens discussions moot. That led to a follow-up question from a visitor: "Why not trade back in to go get the quarterback? He's still sitting there!"

Over the next half hour, several staffers pitched the idea of trading up for Manziel. Taking him with a third first-round selection, they reasoned, would be less threatening to Bradford, who'd remain the incumbent quarterback for at least 2014. Also, as one person put it to Fisher: "This isn't the Johnny Manziel of two hours ago. It's a guy who's mad at the world because he keeps getting passed over, and wants to take it out on everyone."

It was a persuasive argument, but it didn't work: Fisher stood pat; the Browns finally traded up to draft Manziel with the 22nd pick; and Bradford remained the Rams' undisputed quarterback of the present and future, as the coach had intended all along.

 

[-X-]

I found this tidbit from the Michael Silver piece to be interesting:

"This isn't the Johnny Manziel of two hours ago. It's a guy who's mad at the world because he keeps getting passed over, and wants to take it out on everyone."

This isn't the crappy Manziel of two hours ago. This is the mad, crappy Manziel.

 

[jjab360]

This isn't the crappy Manziel of two hours ago. This is the mad, crappy Manziel.

 

[ZigZagRam]

War room visitor of the week.

The son of St. Louis GM Les Snead, Logan Snead, is a buddy of Max Blank (son of Falcons owner Arthur) in seventh grade in Atlanta. So Logan got invited to spend draft night in the Falcons’ draft room with Max on Thursday, and he wore tan slacks and a sharp blue shirt—Ram colors—for the evening.

Interesting: The son of the Rams’ GM inside another team’s draft room. Snead, of course, used to work for Falcons GM Thomas Dimitroff, and the two men are good friends.

“Hey Logan,” Dimitroff said to the boy at one point, “you kidding me with the gold and blue clothes?”

“I’m quietly repping the Rams,” Logan said.

Smart kid.

 

[Boffo97]

I dunno... I know I'm going to get hated on for this, but while I understand the emotion present in that moment, I really don't hope we see Sam kissing guys on a regular basis. He's a Ram. We've accepted that he's going to do what he's going to do off the field and as long as that doesn't involve illegal activities, that's fine. But if we see repetition of this, it's just going to feed into the media circus that takes us farther away from our eventual goal of Sam being seen as just another football player.

It's like how back in 2006, DC decided to bring back the character of Batwoman as a lesbian. For the first few years of her existence, due to bad writing, it kept coming up over and over again that she was a lesbian. The problem was so pronounced that in one fan parody, the word "Lesbian" was literally the only word she could say. The writing's gotten better in recent years by simply making her a character that happens to be a lesbian instead of lesbian being all she was. I don't want being gay to be all that Sam is. That doesn't help the Rams win games.

As an aside, there was quite a bit of irony in DC using Batwoman for such a role. In the 1950s, Batwoman and Bat-Girl (not Batgirl, who was a later character created for the 1960s Adam West TV show) were created in response to Frederic Wertham's book Seduction of the Innocent, which charged, among other things, that Batman and Robin were in a homosexual relationship. The book also led to the creation of the now defunct Comics Code Authority.

 

[MrMotes]

No hate, but if Sam can't been seen in public with his boyfriend then he's not being seen or treated as just another football player...

 

[Boffo97]

No hate, but if Sam can't been seen in public with his boyfriend then he's not being seen or treated as just another football player...

Seen in public, one thing. If PDAs on ESPN become routine, it'll be another.

That's all I'm saying. I have no problem with the one time thing and hope it stays just that. I wouldn't want to see constant reminders of the sexuality of the rest of the Rams roster either. But the media is going to want to make him the gay guy who happens to be a football player rather than let him be the football player who happens to be gay. He's going to have to fight that.

 

[Speeps]

Seen in public, one thing. If PDAs on ESPN become routine, it'll be another.

That's all I'm saying. I have no problem with the one time thing and hope it stays just that. I wouldn't want to see constant reminders of the sexuality of the rest of the Rams roster either. But the media is going to want to make him the gay guy who happens to be a football player rather than let him be the football player who happens to be gay. He's going to have to fight that.

To be fair, the way the media decides to handle the Sam situation is out of Sam's control. If the Rams take the San Diego chargers approach we'll be fine. Fisher is a smart man. 1 or 2 interviews, and then he becomes a mute.

 

[Boffo97]

To be fair, the way the media decides to handle the Sam situation is out of Sam's control. If the Rams take the San Diego chargers approach we'll be fine. Fisher is a smart man. 1 or 2 interviews, and then he becomes a mute.

It's out of his control, but he's going to have be aware of it is all I'm saying.

I agree with you that that's the best approach. Give the media nothing long enough and they'll get bored eventually.

 

[MrMotes]

Seen in public, one thing. If PDAs on ESPN become routine, it'll be another.

That's all I'm saying. I have no problem with the one time thing and hope it stays just that. I wouldn't want to see constant reminders of the sexuality of the rest of the Rams roster either. But the media is going to want to make him the gay guy who happens to be a football player rather than let him be the football player who happens to be gay. He's going to have to fight that.

PDA's on camera when being drafted are routine. They're not normally seen as reminders of sexuality. Same with after a win, or winning an award or whatever. This is new so it will get attention but you don't get to the other side by hiding it...

 

[Boffo97]

PDA's on camera when being drafted are routine. They're not normally seen as reminders of sexuality. Same with after a win, or winning an award or whatever. This is new so it will get attention but you don't get to the other side by hiding it...

And, as I said, I have no problem with it happening the once.

More than that, we really don't see from hetero players either, but the media would love it in this case. ALL I am saying is that he'll need to not give the media any ammo from here on out. That's all.

 

[AnarchyRam]

If he were kissing a woman, nobody (including yourself) would care.

 

[Thordaddy]

Kiss didn't bother me the cake was over the top pandering JMO

 

[Boffo97]

If he were kissing a woman, nobody (including yourself) would care.

Sigh...

I wouldn't want to see constant reminders of the sexuality of the rest of the Rams roster either.

More than that, we really don't see from hetero players either

So you're not only trying to read my mind, but you're accusing me of lying too. If that's how you want to post, I can't stop you, I guess.

EDIT: Also, just to add on to this, while I stand by the above and would care if hetero PDA was under constant display, it really wouldn't be an issue since no one would care outside of the TMZs of the world. Sam is going to be under constant scrutiny with the media all but begging to get another shot like that.