NFL Draft: Just The Worst

The spring is normally my favorite time of the year sports wise.  Yes, I love college football season, but as far as quality and quantity of awesome things happening in sports, the span of late January to early June is typically an amazing run.

Think about it – you get the college football championship which will soon be a Final Four, college basketball conference tournaments, March Madness, the NBA playoffs, and my personal favorite, the Road to Wrestlemania. For the uninitiated, this consists of the stretch of WWE events from the Royal Rumble through Wrestlemania, which spans about 3 months and typically is the best time of the year for a wrestling fan.

Before this year, that span of time has included the NFL draft. This year, though, it’s different.

Normally, at the end of April, we’re waiting with baited breath to see where our favorite players might wind up going.  For me, I am very excited to see what happens to former Ole Miss wide receiver Donte Moncrief.  I remember excitedly standing outside of the Library sports bar in Oxford, Mississippi, on a sunny April Saturday and cheering as Michael Oher and Peria Jerry’s names were announced, and doing the same a few years earlier for Patrick Willis.  Fans of other schools do the same, and it makes sense.  We’ve followed these guys for years, they have represented our favorite universities well, and we get to watch them take the next step.  It’s a cool thing that makes perfect sense.  It’s also fun because we all have favorite NFL teams, so we want to see how they’re going to better themselves, too.  Or maybe you’re a Jets fan and you inevitably hate whatever pick they make. Either way, it makes perfect sense.

This year, though, it’s become unbearable. The draft has been pushed back to May to accommodate Radio City Music Hall’s busy schedule. We can all understand that.

Unfortunately, pretty much every sports media outlet has taken this as a sign to analyze everything so much that everything sucks.  Two players stand out – Johnny Manziel and Jadeveon Clowney.

Pretty much everybody has both of these guys going top 5.  This sucks for them, because the top 5 picks are Houston, Jacksonville (twice), Cleveland, and Oakland.  Houston might not be the worst place in the world, and falling to Atlanta at 6 might be great, because neither of those teams are as bad as they looked last year.  But that’s beside the point – these guys are good, and they are going to get drafted highly.

Enter the worldwide leader.

I’ve gotten to the point where, outside of one episode of Sportscenter and live sporting events, I can’t bear ESPN, and the NFL draft is the perfect example of it.

Maybe you’ve heard Ron Jaworski’s HOT SPROTS TAKE on Manziel. I’m not sold on Manziel as a franchise guy.  He struggled against a few defenses that look fairly similar to what he’ll see in the NFL, he’s tiny, and I don’t know if he can handle the celebrity.  But Jaworski said he wouldn’t draft Manziel in the first three rounds, and admitted to having only watched five games.  Five.  Out of almost 30.  Then, after watching A&M’s pro day, Jaws moved Manziel up his draft board to a third round pick.  You know, the day where George H.W. Bush showed up and Manziel threw over brooms?  The day that Lana Berry proved she was the real star?  Yeah, that somehow changed Jaws’ opinion.

Or perhaps you saw where Merrell Hoge, the guy who is more famous for the size of his tie knot than anything football related, called Jadeveon Clowney an “atrocious” football player.  That speaks for itself.

These guys are human.  They’re going to get it wrong a lot.  That’s fine – we’re all human, we can all understand.  The thing that sucks, though, is that the void created by the draft being pushed back 3 weeks is getting filled with people yelling louder and louder, and getting all the more nonsensical.  The frustrating thing about it is that normally, all that noise ends this weekend.  We can finally move past it and accept these guys for what they were.

Unfortunately, we have 3 weeks of speculation to go.

Thank heavens for fake sports and the NBA.