The Mystery and Mass Appeal of the N.F.L. Draft
Nystrom also told me about a player who wasn’t the hottest prospect in the draft, but was one of the most intriguing: Tyren Montgomery, a wide receiver from John Carroll University, a Division III school that hadn’t had a player drafted in thirty-five years. (That player was the final selection in the 1991 draft, a distinction affectionately known as Mr. Irrelevant.) Nystrom tirelessly researches the draft, keeping a spreadsheet of data (ages, playing stats, hand widths) on nearly two thousand players, and publicly ranks his top five hundred, nearly twice as many as will actually be drafted. But in January, when he attended the Senior Bowl, an all-star showcase of draft prospects, Montgomery was unfamiliar. “I know everyone,” Nystrom told me. “I’ve never heard of this guy.”
Nystrom, who holds an MFA in nonfiction from the University of Iowa, was struck by Montgomery’s trajectory: He had only started playing football in college, but at the showcase he stood out against sure-fire defenders from the start. He now had a chance to be selected in the later rounds of the draft, where rookies usually have to fight to make the team but sometimes become starters or even stars. “You have a wide range of outcomes,” Nystrom said. “He’s new to the sport, coming from D-III, but we just saw him lick a bunch of a hundred top prospects.” This is the central attraction of the draft: a player can be worth nothing. But it could also become anything.
For a league run by some of America’s most fervent capitalists, the NFL has a strange relationship with the free market. Nowadays, team payroll is capped and league revenue is shared. The goal is to create competitive parity, or at least the appearance of parity, to sell the idea that any team can win on any Sunday. The draft was the league’s first step in that direction. In 1935, the owner of the infamously dismissed Philadelphia Eagles was fed up with top teams scooping up all the best players and proposed the draft as a remedy. For some reason, the top teams agreed. It started the next year as a simple affair, with coaches smoking cigars in a hotel room and scribbling names on a chalkboard. This year, Mendoza was up for a four-year contract worth nearly sixty million dollars, whereas in 1936 the No. 1 pick, Jay Berwanger, a running back from the University of Chicago, had turned down a thousand-dollar-a-game contract and never played professionally. Instead, he turned to rubber and plastics.
In 1980, when ESPN was not yet a year old and desperate to partner with the major leagues, the network approached Pete Rozelle, then NFL commissioner, about televising the draft. “Pete started laughing out loud,” recalls Steve Bornstein, former president of ESPN. Like for a long time Sports Illustrated Writer Peter King told me that Rozelle “thought it would be embarrassing, because nothing bad happens.” But Rozelle agreed and ESPN decided to make an event of it. “The higher-ups said, ‘If this thing doesn’t work, go soft and get off the air,'” Bob Ley, who anchored ten drafts for ESPN, told me of that first televised draft. It aired on a Tuesday morning and consisted mostly of guys chatting placidly at a desk. The action shots showed men making inaudible phone calls in the ballroom of the New York Sheraton. “It’s like the difference between Edison’s first kinetoscope and the last movie shown at the Cineplex,” Ley said, comparing the project then to today. “Technically, they’re part of the same entertainment family, but just barely.”
“Let’s have another child so she can have someone to play with.”
Cartoon by Jeremy Nguyen
That year, ESPN aired eight hours of draft coverage (surprisingly, only the first third of the draft’s selections), a number it gradually increased until it began televising every pick, over a two-day period, in the mid-1990s. It had discovered what now seems obvious: at the lowest point of the football calendar – three months after the Super Bowl, three months before the preseason games – fans were hungry for even the idea of this sport. “Sports fans have an incredible ability to seem to care more about the future than the present,” Daniel Wann, a psychology professor at Murray State who focuses on sports fans, told me. “They live in an unknown world.” Uncertainty and anticipation are at the heart of dopamine release: the countdown to vacation, the planning of the perfect party, the thrill of the chase. It’s fun to see your team win. It can be just as fun to hope they will and imagine how. “It’s theater of the mind,” Nystrom told me. A colleague of mine once compared it to football fan fiction.
The most transformative change to ESPN’s coverage came in 1984, with the addition of Kiper, the ur-draftnik. A few years earlier, he had left community college to compile and sell draft guidebooks out of his parents’ basement in Maryland. He was sharp and sharp-looking, with a vaguely avian face beneath a dark pompadour, and was doggedly devoted – all year round – to a subject that few media outlets were interested in. When a team drafted a linebacker from Appalachian State in the fifth round, Kiper was able to offer a torrent of evaluations. “Before we had the flashy graphics and pre-produced research packages, we had Mel,” Ley said. Writers likened his Baltimore-tinged, auctioneer-like speech to “a breathless cross between the machine gun and Morse code,” and described him as having “the wit of a scholar beneath the still hairstyle of a lounge act.” Chris Berman, one of ESPN’s first anchors, told me about Kiper: “I didn’t know someone like this existed. »
