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These are excerpts. To read the whole article click the link below. There's a Peter King mock draft included if you're interested. There's also a story on the Rams-Chiefs game.
**************************************************************************************
https://www.si.com/nfl/2018/04/23/mock-draft-prospects-trades-first-round-mmqb-peter-king
Darts, Deals & Wild Guesses
There is no normal in the 2018 NFL Draft, where waffling logic and super-secret general managers make predictions nearly impossible. Here’s our best guess at how Round 1 will go. Plus more on the Chiefs-Rams game in Mexico, and draft tidbits galore.
By Peter King
DRAFT MARGINALIA
A few more draft-related notes:
• Denzel Ward has earned my respect. The Ohio State cornerback had a tweaked ankle at the combine and left without doing some of the traditional athletic drills, including the 20-yard short shuttle. One team wanted that short shuttle. This team told Ward it needed the shuttle to complete its evaluation.
A rep of the team told Ward he could even just find a friend to take a cellphone video of Ward doing the shuttle, and send it to the team. The team heard nothing back. Finally, on Saturday, the coach for this team got a ping on his smart phone. It was from Ward, with a slightly shaky video of him doing the short shuttle on an empty field somewhere. I doubt this team picks him, but it says something about Ward completing this task that’s impressive.
• The final word on the quarterbacks. I asked one longtime and well-connected scout about what he’s hearing regarding the order of top quarterbacks in this draft. In other words, if teams with a quarterback need could show their boards, what order would they go in? “Allen one, very slightly ahead of Darnold. Then Mayfield. But the people who like Mayfield love Mayfield.” Watch for Arizona trading up on Mayfield if he gets past the Jets and Broncos.
• There will be some trades in this draft that might seem one-sided. Several team officials told me in the past few days that they value Day 2 picks (rounds two and three) so highly that they’d be willing to take slightly less in compensation to move down. Where could this come into play? Cleveland (four), Indianapolis (six), Baltimore (16), Seattle (18), New England (23, 31), New Orleans (27), Philadelphia (32).
“This is not your typical draft,” said one veteran club official Sunday. “The second, third and even fourth rounds are gold. You can take less than the trade-value chart says and still make a very good trade if you get multiple picks in those rounds.”
• The draft was more fun then. In the 17th and final round of the 1972 draft, GM Joe Thomas of the Baltimore Colts turned to 32-year-old PR guy Ernie Accorsi and said: “I am exhausted. You make the pick.” The 17th-round picks, in those days, were training-camp bodies, with long odds to ever make an NFL roster.
The draft wasn’t televised in 1972, and the later rounds were a just-get-it-done affair. Accorsi gave him this name: Tim Berra, wide receiver/kick returner, UMass. How cool. Yogi Berra’s son, drafted into the NFL. “And he made the team!” Accorsi said. “He returned a kick for a touchdown for us in an exhibition game, and he made our roster for the ’74 season.”
• Hall of Fame Factoid I Have Used Before But Never Gets Old. In 1964, these were consecutive picks:
Round 7, 88th Overall, to Dallas: Bob Hayes, WR, Florida A&M
Round 7, 89th Overall, to Detroit: Bill Parcells, OT, Wichita State
Parcells was picked 21 spots ahead of Leroy Kelly and 40 ahead of Roger Staubach.
CALLING ALL SCHEDULE NERDS!
If you’re bored by the process of making the NFL schedule, please skip this section. It’s straight from Schedule Nerdland. But I like it, and it’s a cool example of how the sausage gets made.
Sometimes in the process of gathering information for my annual how-the-NFL-made-this-year’s-schedule story, I hear interesting stories about things pertaining to the schedule, often from people around the league, sometimes from people inside the Val Pinchbeck Room, where over four months of digital trial-and-error, four NFL employees get the 256 regular-season games arranged.
“Really, the process couldn’t be more boring. But there’s such an incredible fascination with the end result.”
—NFL schedule-maker Howard Katz, who works with a four-person team for four months to come up with the schedule each year. I wrote about it last Thursday night—the process of 1,000 computers spitting out 59,031 possible schedules, quoting Katz and longtime aide Mike North about the process.
Said Katz: “Mike is trying to get the computer to think the way I’m thinking.”
PETER KING/THE MMQB
This year the story is about the Rams-Chiefs game in Mexico City. Do you see the photo above? It’s a stack of “dead schedules,” those that looked very promising and passed muster enough to get hard looks from the master of the schedule, Howard Katz.
After I left the Pinchbeck Room on Thursday evening, I made a few calls to see how the schedule was playing out in the league (favorably in most precincts, I heard). And a couple people were talking about Rams-Chiefs, and how that become one of the really attractive games in the league this year. They wondered how ESPN got it—and whether CBS or FOX (for a Thursday nighter) or NBC (Sunday night) was in the mix.
The answer, as it turns out, is they all were.
Think of the game: Two division champs, each likely to be very good in 2018, exporting the game to a place sure to draw 100,000, in what is likely to be a frenzied atmosphere. There was the added zest of the Chiefs trading one of the best young corners, Marcus Peters, to the Rams this year, and Peters wanted to exact revenge on the Chiefs.
The league pegged the game for Week 11. Apparently the schedule-makers, Katz and Mike North particularly, originally preferred the game to be on Thursday night. Rams COO Kevin Demoff told me yes, this was the case, and the urging to make this a showcase game began at the Super Bowl. For two reasons:
The league wanted to reward FOX for rescuing it by bidding up the Thursday night rights fees—now $660 million for the 11-game package, an increase of 30 percent from 2017—and simply for a potential huge rating for a package of games that needed the boost based on falling 2017 Thursday viewership. Plus, it was likely to be a really fun game, and the bigger the audience, the better for the NFL.
A couple of problems. The league couldn’t bring two teams to Mexico City on a short week unless they had their byes the week before. And no team wants a Thursday night game coming off the bye, because that likely would mean the team would have to return to work on the Saturday before the game, cutting a couple of days from the players’ time off.
For players, that’s a taboo. In addition, there was problem for the Rams: Customs at Los Angeles International Airport closes at 12:30 a.m. daily. The Rams likely would have to stay overnight in Mexico City and leave the next day to account for that. Teams hate staying on the road after road games.
It was the Rams giving up the home game to make the Mexico game a reality, so the league had to make it right for them. Demoff said North worked on him during Super Bowl week about playing on Thursday night in Mexico. “But we were adamant that it could not happen,” Demoff said. “Especially on a Thursday, with the bye issue. And for any prime-time games, we’d have the Customs issue at LAX. We thought this game should be a Sunday afternoon doubleheader game.”
Early Sunday was out, because the Rams would push back against a 10:05 a.m. PT game; West Coast teams hate the early-body-clock games. The Sunday doubleheader was interesting … but what would happen if the scheduled Sunday night game ended up having to be flexed out, and the league wanted to put Chiefs-Rams in there?
Tough to flex to a game in Mexico, and say to NBC: You’ve got to do an international game in 13 days. Similarly, if the league made it a Sunday night game, what if the Chiefs or Rams stunk and the league had to flex out of the game? Tough to tell CBS to get a crew into Mexico that fast.
As for Monday night, the Customs issue was real for the Rams. What, the schedulers thought, could happen if we gave the Chiefs and Rams their bye in Week 12—Thanksgiving Week?
That week traditionally doesn’t have byes, because it’s tough to build a good Sunday schedule when three Thursday games are removed for Thanksgiving and there’s both a Sunday and Monday nighter. Giving two teams byes would mean a thin 10-game daylight slate for Sunday.
But the NFL saw it could build a decent schedule and still give the Chiefs and Rams byes. Pats-Jets plus a Jags-Bills playoff rematch in the early CBS window; Giants-Eagles and Russell Wilson-Cam Newton in the early FOX window; Steelers-Broncos as the CBS doubleheader game; the Packers-Vikings rivalry on Sunday night; Deshaun Watson-Marcus Mariota on Monday night. Not the best Sunday of the season, but not bad either.
And so it happened. The bye is late, but for two teams hoping to make the playoffs, look at it this way: Two teams (Washington and Carolina) have byes in Week 4, which means they’ll play three games, have a bye, then play 13 straight weeks. Now two teams have the bye in Week 12, which mean they’ll play 11 straight weeks to start the season, have a bye, then play five games at a time of the year when the bye is likely needed more than Washington and Carolina needed in Week 4.
That’s where this photo of the pile of schedules comes in. I’m told some of them died because of the Rams-Chiefs kerfuffle. But it got solved, without much attention. And now you know how problems get worked out with the schedule, and why, in part, it takes four people four months to do.
Some perspective, from North: “The incredible thing is not even that we get through half a million schedule possibilities now … The miracle is Val Pinchbeck used to build this thing by hand. One game at a time. Not even being able to consider things like rest disparity, travel, stadium blocks, not even being able to think about, oh, so-and-so caught a three-game road trip last year so it shouldn’t happen to him again. We can be really discerning now.”
In the end, the NFL considered 59,031 schedules, including some of the dead schedules that had Rams-Chiefs in all different windows. That’s something, very likely, Pinchbeck’s schedule could never have contemplated.
STATS OF THE WEEK
So when the draft kicks off on Thursday night, one team’s fans are going to have to be patient. Like, ridiculously patient.
The Rams’ first pick is the 87th overall choice, barring a trade. That’s two-thirds of the way down into the third round. Los Angeles will not have a pick Thursday night for the approximately three-and-a-half-hour first round. Los Angeles will not have a pick for the approximately two-and-a-half-hour second round. Los Angeles will not have a pick for about the first 70 minutes of Round 3. In total, that’s seven hours of dead time for Rams fans.
Thursday’s draft coverage starts at 8 p.m. ET. Nothing for the Rams that night.
Friday’s draft coverage starts at 7 p.m. ET. Nothing for the Rams that night, if the timing is approximately what it was last year, until about 10:38 p.m. ET.
Then nothing until late in Round 4, the 35th pick of day three.
That better be one heck of a draft party, with lots of free booze, for the Rams in Los Angeles this weekend.
THINGS I THINK I THINK
1. I think I hope the 32 NFL owners saw Colin Kaepernick get the Amnesty International Ambassador of Conscience Award in Amsterdam on Saturday night. An internationally noted citizen cannot find employment in the NFL. If that’s not a damning indictment of the NFL, I don’t know what is.
uke:
2. I think this would earn a disapproving stare from Houston coach Bill O’Brien:
a. The Texans played the Patriots in Foxboro on Sept. 22, 2016.
b. The Texans played the Patriots in Foxboro on Sept. 24, 2017.
c. The Texans will play the Patriots in Foxboro on Sept. 9, 2018.
3. I think this is the definition of fan loyalty: Since midseason 2016, the Nebraska Cornhuskers are 6-12, including losses of 62-3, 56-14, 54-21 and 56-14. On Saturday, they drew 86,818 paying customers to see their spring game.
4. I think, if you want to know why we are buried in a hillock of mock drafts today, read this story by The MMQB’s Tim Rohan. And read Bill Belichick talk about the godfather of mocks and of scouting college players for every team as a hobby, the late Joel Buchsbaum. What a relationship Belichick and Buchsbaum had. As relayed by Hub Arkush, Belichick once said: “Joel was one of my best friends.”
5. I think I am one person, flailing against the gigantic windmill that is NFL Draftmania, which is so loved by the NFL because it keeps NFL beat people and draftnik sites in full-draft-promotion mode for four full months, further bolstering the prospect for higher ratings on the three-day draft weekend.
It is absurd that the NFL draft begins 108 days after the college football season ends, and 152 days after the last big Saturday of the college football season. There is no good reason for the draft to be so late, and to add to the already mountainous degree of difficulty for these college players by preventing them from working with their teams until May.
6. I think bigger isn’t always better, but you’d never know that by covering the National Football League.
7. I think I appreciate Awful Announcing’s Matt Yoder drawing attention to the bloated draft coverage by pointing to a passage in a Sporting News story about the NFL’s draft plans for the Dallas area this weekend, and the TV plans therein:
“And as the annual football festival grows in popularity, some league executives envision the draft potentially becoming the sports equivalent of a U.S. presidential election—a sports event televised simultaneously across most or all of the national broadcast networks: NBC, CBS, Fox and ESPN’s sister Disney network ABC.
This year’s event will be televised by a record six TV entities, including two broadcast channels (Fox and ABC) and four cable networks (ESPN, ESPN2, ESPN Deportes and NFL Network). ABC will simulcast ESPN’s coverage of Rounds 4-7 on Saturday. That means all seven rounds will air on broadcast television for the first time.
“That’s one of the key provisos, said sources. If the league’s other broadcast partners eventually want the draft, they would likely have to televise it on their main broadcast channels, not their smaller sports cable networks. In other words, NBC Sports would have to show it on NBC, not NBCSN, and so forth. Fox is airing it this year on so-called ‘big Fox’ rather than its FS1/FS2 cable channels.”
Writes Yoder: “I can think of few things further detached from reality than the NFL actually envisioning the draft (again, not the Super Bowl, not even a game, but the draft) being on the same level as the presidential election.”
8. I think the best football news of the week, other than the fact that we’ve got only three days of hype yet before round one, is that the Monday night games will (should) be over before Colbert every week now. The new start time: 8:15 p.m. ET, 15 minutes earlier than the old time.
9. I think congrats are in order for Chris Palmer, the first head coach in the revitalized history (1999-today) of the Cleveland Browns. He’s now the athletics director at the University of New Haven, the place that gave him his first football head-coaching job in 1986. Talked to Palmer the other day, and he’s happy living a totally different life at a small liberal-arts college, giving back for what became his good fortune a long time ago.
**************************************************************************************
https://www.si.com/nfl/2018/04/23/mock-draft-prospects-trades-first-round-mmqb-peter-king
Darts, Deals & Wild Guesses
There is no normal in the 2018 NFL Draft, where waffling logic and super-secret general managers make predictions nearly impossible. Here’s our best guess at how Round 1 will go. Plus more on the Chiefs-Rams game in Mexico, and draft tidbits galore.
By Peter King
DRAFT MARGINALIA
A few more draft-related notes:
• Denzel Ward has earned my respect. The Ohio State cornerback had a tweaked ankle at the combine and left without doing some of the traditional athletic drills, including the 20-yard short shuttle. One team wanted that short shuttle. This team told Ward it needed the shuttle to complete its evaluation.
A rep of the team told Ward he could even just find a friend to take a cellphone video of Ward doing the shuttle, and send it to the team. The team heard nothing back. Finally, on Saturday, the coach for this team got a ping on his smart phone. It was from Ward, with a slightly shaky video of him doing the short shuttle on an empty field somewhere. I doubt this team picks him, but it says something about Ward completing this task that’s impressive.
• The final word on the quarterbacks. I asked one longtime and well-connected scout about what he’s hearing regarding the order of top quarterbacks in this draft. In other words, if teams with a quarterback need could show their boards, what order would they go in? “Allen one, very slightly ahead of Darnold. Then Mayfield. But the people who like Mayfield love Mayfield.” Watch for Arizona trading up on Mayfield if he gets past the Jets and Broncos.
• There will be some trades in this draft that might seem one-sided. Several team officials told me in the past few days that they value Day 2 picks (rounds two and three) so highly that they’d be willing to take slightly less in compensation to move down. Where could this come into play? Cleveland (four), Indianapolis (six), Baltimore (16), Seattle (18), New England (23, 31), New Orleans (27), Philadelphia (32).
“This is not your typical draft,” said one veteran club official Sunday. “The second, third and even fourth rounds are gold. You can take less than the trade-value chart says and still make a very good trade if you get multiple picks in those rounds.”
• The draft was more fun then. In the 17th and final round of the 1972 draft, GM Joe Thomas of the Baltimore Colts turned to 32-year-old PR guy Ernie Accorsi and said: “I am exhausted. You make the pick.” The 17th-round picks, in those days, were training-camp bodies, with long odds to ever make an NFL roster.
The draft wasn’t televised in 1972, and the later rounds were a just-get-it-done affair. Accorsi gave him this name: Tim Berra, wide receiver/kick returner, UMass. How cool. Yogi Berra’s son, drafted into the NFL. “And he made the team!” Accorsi said. “He returned a kick for a touchdown for us in an exhibition game, and he made our roster for the ’74 season.”
• Hall of Fame Factoid I Have Used Before But Never Gets Old. In 1964, these were consecutive picks:
Round 7, 88th Overall, to Dallas: Bob Hayes, WR, Florida A&M
Round 7, 89th Overall, to Detroit: Bill Parcells, OT, Wichita State
Parcells was picked 21 spots ahead of Leroy Kelly and 40 ahead of Roger Staubach.
CALLING ALL SCHEDULE NERDS!
If you’re bored by the process of making the NFL schedule, please skip this section. It’s straight from Schedule Nerdland. But I like it, and it’s a cool example of how the sausage gets made.
Sometimes in the process of gathering information for my annual how-the-NFL-made-this-year’s-schedule story, I hear interesting stories about things pertaining to the schedule, often from people around the league, sometimes from people inside the Val Pinchbeck Room, where over four months of digital trial-and-error, four NFL employees get the 256 regular-season games arranged.
“Really, the process couldn’t be more boring. But there’s such an incredible fascination with the end result.”
—NFL schedule-maker Howard Katz, who works with a four-person team for four months to come up with the schedule each year. I wrote about it last Thursday night—the process of 1,000 computers spitting out 59,031 possible schedules, quoting Katz and longtime aide Mike North about the process.
Said Katz: “Mike is trying to get the computer to think the way I’m thinking.”
PETER KING/THE MMQB
This year the story is about the Rams-Chiefs game in Mexico City. Do you see the photo above? It’s a stack of “dead schedules,” those that looked very promising and passed muster enough to get hard looks from the master of the schedule, Howard Katz.
After I left the Pinchbeck Room on Thursday evening, I made a few calls to see how the schedule was playing out in the league (favorably in most precincts, I heard). And a couple people were talking about Rams-Chiefs, and how that become one of the really attractive games in the league this year. They wondered how ESPN got it—and whether CBS or FOX (for a Thursday nighter) or NBC (Sunday night) was in the mix.
The answer, as it turns out, is they all were.
Think of the game: Two division champs, each likely to be very good in 2018, exporting the game to a place sure to draw 100,000, in what is likely to be a frenzied atmosphere. There was the added zest of the Chiefs trading one of the best young corners, Marcus Peters, to the Rams this year, and Peters wanted to exact revenge on the Chiefs.
The league pegged the game for Week 11. Apparently the schedule-makers, Katz and Mike North particularly, originally preferred the game to be on Thursday night. Rams COO Kevin Demoff told me yes, this was the case, and the urging to make this a showcase game began at the Super Bowl. For two reasons:
The league wanted to reward FOX for rescuing it by bidding up the Thursday night rights fees—now $660 million for the 11-game package, an increase of 30 percent from 2017—and simply for a potential huge rating for a package of games that needed the boost based on falling 2017 Thursday viewership. Plus, it was likely to be a really fun game, and the bigger the audience, the better for the NFL.
A couple of problems. The league couldn’t bring two teams to Mexico City on a short week unless they had their byes the week before. And no team wants a Thursday night game coming off the bye, because that likely would mean the team would have to return to work on the Saturday before the game, cutting a couple of days from the players’ time off.
For players, that’s a taboo. In addition, there was problem for the Rams: Customs at Los Angeles International Airport closes at 12:30 a.m. daily. The Rams likely would have to stay overnight in Mexico City and leave the next day to account for that. Teams hate staying on the road after road games.
It was the Rams giving up the home game to make the Mexico game a reality, so the league had to make it right for them. Demoff said North worked on him during Super Bowl week about playing on Thursday night in Mexico. “But we were adamant that it could not happen,” Demoff said. “Especially on a Thursday, with the bye issue. And for any prime-time games, we’d have the Customs issue at LAX. We thought this game should be a Sunday afternoon doubleheader game.”
Early Sunday was out, because the Rams would push back against a 10:05 a.m. PT game; West Coast teams hate the early-body-clock games. The Sunday doubleheader was interesting … but what would happen if the scheduled Sunday night game ended up having to be flexed out, and the league wanted to put Chiefs-Rams in there?
Tough to flex to a game in Mexico, and say to NBC: You’ve got to do an international game in 13 days. Similarly, if the league made it a Sunday night game, what if the Chiefs or Rams stunk and the league had to flex out of the game? Tough to tell CBS to get a crew into Mexico that fast.
As for Monday night, the Customs issue was real for the Rams. What, the schedulers thought, could happen if we gave the Chiefs and Rams their bye in Week 12—Thanksgiving Week?
That week traditionally doesn’t have byes, because it’s tough to build a good Sunday schedule when three Thursday games are removed for Thanksgiving and there’s both a Sunday and Monday nighter. Giving two teams byes would mean a thin 10-game daylight slate for Sunday.
But the NFL saw it could build a decent schedule and still give the Chiefs and Rams byes. Pats-Jets plus a Jags-Bills playoff rematch in the early CBS window; Giants-Eagles and Russell Wilson-Cam Newton in the early FOX window; Steelers-Broncos as the CBS doubleheader game; the Packers-Vikings rivalry on Sunday night; Deshaun Watson-Marcus Mariota on Monday night. Not the best Sunday of the season, but not bad either.
And so it happened. The bye is late, but for two teams hoping to make the playoffs, look at it this way: Two teams (Washington and Carolina) have byes in Week 4, which means they’ll play three games, have a bye, then play 13 straight weeks. Now two teams have the bye in Week 12, which mean they’ll play 11 straight weeks to start the season, have a bye, then play five games at a time of the year when the bye is likely needed more than Washington and Carolina needed in Week 4.
That’s where this photo of the pile of schedules comes in. I’m told some of them died because of the Rams-Chiefs kerfuffle. But it got solved, without much attention. And now you know how problems get worked out with the schedule, and why, in part, it takes four people four months to do.
Some perspective, from North: “The incredible thing is not even that we get through half a million schedule possibilities now … The miracle is Val Pinchbeck used to build this thing by hand. One game at a time. Not even being able to consider things like rest disparity, travel, stadium blocks, not even being able to think about, oh, so-and-so caught a three-game road trip last year so it shouldn’t happen to him again. We can be really discerning now.”
In the end, the NFL considered 59,031 schedules, including some of the dead schedules that had Rams-Chiefs in all different windows. That’s something, very likely, Pinchbeck’s schedule could never have contemplated.
STATS OF THE WEEK
So when the draft kicks off on Thursday night, one team’s fans are going to have to be patient. Like, ridiculously patient.
The Rams’ first pick is the 87th overall choice, barring a trade. That’s two-thirds of the way down into the third round. Los Angeles will not have a pick Thursday night for the approximately three-and-a-half-hour first round. Los Angeles will not have a pick for the approximately two-and-a-half-hour second round. Los Angeles will not have a pick for about the first 70 minutes of Round 3. In total, that’s seven hours of dead time for Rams fans.
Thursday’s draft coverage starts at 8 p.m. ET. Nothing for the Rams that night.
Friday’s draft coverage starts at 7 p.m. ET. Nothing for the Rams that night, if the timing is approximately what it was last year, until about 10:38 p.m. ET.
Then nothing until late in Round 4, the 35th pick of day three.
That better be one heck of a draft party, with lots of free booze, for the Rams in Los Angeles this weekend.
THINGS I THINK I THINK
1. I think I hope the 32 NFL owners saw Colin Kaepernick get the Amnesty International Ambassador of Conscience Award in Amsterdam on Saturday night. An internationally noted citizen cannot find employment in the NFL. If that’s not a damning indictment of the NFL, I don’t know what is.
uke:2. I think this would earn a disapproving stare from Houston coach Bill O’Brien:
a. The Texans played the Patriots in Foxboro on Sept. 22, 2016.
b. The Texans played the Patriots in Foxboro on Sept. 24, 2017.
c. The Texans will play the Patriots in Foxboro on Sept. 9, 2018.
3. I think this is the definition of fan loyalty: Since midseason 2016, the Nebraska Cornhuskers are 6-12, including losses of 62-3, 56-14, 54-21 and 56-14. On Saturday, they drew 86,818 paying customers to see their spring game.
4. I think, if you want to know why we are buried in a hillock of mock drafts today, read this story by The MMQB’s Tim Rohan. And read Bill Belichick talk about the godfather of mocks and of scouting college players for every team as a hobby, the late Joel Buchsbaum. What a relationship Belichick and Buchsbaum had. As relayed by Hub Arkush, Belichick once said: “Joel was one of my best friends.”
5. I think I am one person, flailing against the gigantic windmill that is NFL Draftmania, which is so loved by the NFL because it keeps NFL beat people and draftnik sites in full-draft-promotion mode for four full months, further bolstering the prospect for higher ratings on the three-day draft weekend.
It is absurd that the NFL draft begins 108 days after the college football season ends, and 152 days after the last big Saturday of the college football season. There is no good reason for the draft to be so late, and to add to the already mountainous degree of difficulty for these college players by preventing them from working with their teams until May.
6. I think bigger isn’t always better, but you’d never know that by covering the National Football League.
7. I think I appreciate Awful Announcing’s Matt Yoder drawing attention to the bloated draft coverage by pointing to a passage in a Sporting News story about the NFL’s draft plans for the Dallas area this weekend, and the TV plans therein:
“And as the annual football festival grows in popularity, some league executives envision the draft potentially becoming the sports equivalent of a U.S. presidential election—a sports event televised simultaneously across most or all of the national broadcast networks: NBC, CBS, Fox and ESPN’s sister Disney network ABC.
This year’s event will be televised by a record six TV entities, including two broadcast channels (Fox and ABC) and four cable networks (ESPN, ESPN2, ESPN Deportes and NFL Network). ABC will simulcast ESPN’s coverage of Rounds 4-7 on Saturday. That means all seven rounds will air on broadcast television for the first time.
“That’s one of the key provisos, said sources. If the league’s other broadcast partners eventually want the draft, they would likely have to televise it on their main broadcast channels, not their smaller sports cable networks. In other words, NBC Sports would have to show it on NBC, not NBCSN, and so forth. Fox is airing it this year on so-called ‘big Fox’ rather than its FS1/FS2 cable channels.”
Writes Yoder: “I can think of few things further detached from reality than the NFL actually envisioning the draft (again, not the Super Bowl, not even a game, but the draft) being on the same level as the presidential election.”
8. I think the best football news of the week, other than the fact that we’ve got only three days of hype yet before round one, is that the Monday night games will (should) be over before Colbert every week now. The new start time: 8:15 p.m. ET, 15 minutes earlier than the old time.
9. I think congrats are in order for Chris Palmer, the first head coach in the revitalized history (1999-today) of the Cleveland Browns. He’s now the athletics director at the University of New Haven, the place that gave him his first football head-coaching job in 1986. Talked to Palmer the other day, and he’s happy living a totally different life at a small liberal-arts college, giving back for what became his good fortune a long time ago.
