"Sports don't build character; they reveal it." John Wooden
Yay! We have finally…I mean, FINALLY…made it to Draft Day! Actually, the NFL draft this year has been moved from its usual weekend schedule to the brand new Prime Time spot at 7:30pm on Thursday, April 22nd on ESPN. Girls, it’s extremely important that you watch this phenomenon because it will give you an in-depth look at the selection process for new talent and it is crucial in becoming a football fanatic. Not to mention, Draft Day is kind of like Christmas morning for football fans with everything leading up to this moment in the football calendar. It is the ne plus ultra of the football year if you will. Since the Super Bowl, we have gone through a relative dearth of football news and the long months till August are looking pretty bleak indeed. But what’s this!?! The NFL Draft comes along the last weekend in April and its all holiday for us! All this raw talent out there—who is my team going to choose? Which players are my rivals going to get? Ooooohhh, it is so exciting!
At least pretend you’re excited. Maybe the reason that you just can’t get into it is due to the fact that the Draft is like an incomprehensible enigma that only some people seem to understand. Well, look no further, dear lady! I shall expound the common Draft mythology so that you too may become handy with the lingo.
As I discussed in my last blog, two major events occur in the off season that affect the cohesion of your embryonic team. The first one is the Free Agency for veteran talent, allowing teams to trade or swap their players in an effort to find a balance between talent and price…and personality. I added personality to the list because some players, though really good, just don’t belong on certain teams. Take for example Brandon Marshall of the Denver Broncos. He is a veteran wide receiver having some problems with the overall team so he was traded to the Dolphins. Right now, everyone is happy.
The second event is, of course, The Draft. We discussed the Draft briefly in reference to the Combine, which is where the young players who wish to be drafted try out their skills in a variety of tests. On Thursday, those results will then coalesce into hard decisions made by the various teams themselves. These decisions will impact the entire direction of their teams, leading either to victory, one hopes, or to defeat. Unlike Free Agency where teams must determine to acquire a player based on age or talent, the main question that infests the Draft mainly deals with a sort of to be or not to be in regards to each new recruit.
When I say “raw talent,” I mean just that…these are players that have never played in an NFL game. That means that they have no concept of just how much faster and better NFL players and how fast NFL games are in general. Remember that the NFL is the best of the best playing each other. These young players are trying to find their way into this elite group but there is no real way to know how they will ultimately perform under the NFL’s conditions. Thus, each NFL team is faced with a weighty dilemma—how to find that diamond in the rough, who will perform at the highest level, without spending the entire team salary on that one player?
Pretty much the entire Draft can be summed in that one question. The Draft has been around 76 years and in that time there have been countless flops. Some players can ace the Combine and say all the right things during the interviews but once on a real NFL team, they can’t seem to handle the level of play. Ryan Leaf comes to mind here. It’s a General Manager’s worst nightmare: to draft a promising young player with all the attendant salary and bonuses, just to have him fall apart in front of a viewing audience of several million people. On the other hand, there have also been countless stories of players making it big, even though they were disregarded on Draft Day. Take Tom Brady for example—he was drafted in the 6th round (I’ll explain the significance of that later) and then proceeded to absolutely kick ass in the NFL by winning 3 Super Bowl rings. Not too shabby—and better yet, New England drafted him for a song.
And honestly, there is positively no way to quantify all that will make The Perfect Player. Football gurus out there will try to make informed guesses and will inundate you with mock drafts all the way to the penultimate moment, trying to be the first to say “I told you so” when the real Draft occurs. They will throw stats at you and quotes by the recruiters, the GMs, the owners, the players’ coaches, their mothers, etc on how perfect such-and-such a player will be but in the end, there is no way to really, truly know how a player will stand under the pressure of professional sport.
Now I also do not want to give you the impression that the Draft is one big crapshoot either. There is a method to the madness of that day but it is derived from taking the quantifiable qualities along with a hefty dose of the unquantifiable and putting together a giant plan of what players coming out this one year fulfill some of the team's key needs at the lowest price guaranteed. Ha! Even as I write this I find that this sounds so ridiculous. But this is the way of the NFL Draft…and the beauty of it as well.
The actual Draft consists of 7 rounds. If you don’t know what a “round” is think of boxing. Round 1 in boxing is so many minutes long and then the bell rings for a breather. Next round and so on. It’s the same with the Draft. Round 1, obviously the most important and highly anticipated round, is where the talent auction begins. Each round allows each NFL team one chance to make a selection during the Draft. Therefore, since there are 32 NFL teams, there will be 32 players picked each round and each team then has 7 picks. The number of picks can fluctuate for a team depending on whether they traded some of theirs away or if they picked up extra ones. Draft picks can be a very hot commodity, instead of actual money, when one team wants a player from another team or vice versa. Thus, when a player is traded you might hear that one team received, in return, another player and a second round draft pick. Just recently the Pittsburgh Steelers traded WR Santonio Holmes to the New York Jets in exchange for a 5th round draft pick. As you can tell by the low draft number, Holmes had some issues.
At the start of the Draft, the NFL Commissioner will give a little speech, which effectively highlights the talent-to-come and the expectations of the teams and proceeds to call the 2010 NFL Draft to order. That is when the first team goes “on the clock.” Being “on the clock” simply means that one team and one team only has the opportunity to determining who they want. Each team is allowed 3-4 minutes to be “on the clock” while behind the scenes, frantic deals and decisions are made. At the end of the alloted time, the team then must make a decision—either they decide which player they want or they may sell their draft pick to another team in exchange for something else. Now who would want to sell their draft pick? Good question because that brings up nicely the most important part of the Draft: your team’s place in line.
What determines where each team goes? Good news for you, ladies! This is the easiest part of the entire affair to understand. The order of the Draft is determined by the previous year’s team’s standing. Basically, that just means that the worst team in the NFL last year will be the first team making a selection at this year’s Draft. By that same standard, you may assume that the team that won the Super Bowl, the New Orleans Saints, will be the absolute last team to pick in Round One. And you would be right, of course. Here is a list of the draft order for Round One for this year:
1. St Louis Rams
2. Detroit Lions
3. Tampa Bay Buccaneers
4. Washington Redskins
5. Kansas City Chiefs
6. Seattle Seahawks
7. Cleveland Browns
8. Oakland Raiders
9. Buffalo Bills
10. Jacksonville Jaguars
11. Denver Broncos (they traded for this spot from Chicago. This spot does not reflect their standing from last year)
12. Miami Dolphins
13. San Francisco 49ers
14. Seattle Seahawks (traded from Denver)
15. NY Giants
16. Tennessee Titans
17. San Francisco 49ers (traded from Carolina)
18. Pittsburgh Steelers
19. Atlanta Falcons
20. Houston Texans
21. Cincinnati Bengals
22. New England Patriots
23. Green Bay Packers
24. Philadelphia Eagles
25. Baltimore Ravens
26. Arizona Cardinals
27. Dallas Cowboys
28. San Diego Chargers
29. New York Jets
30. Minnesota Vikings
31. Indianapolis Colts
32. New Orleans SaintsThere is a lot of strategy that goes into trading draft picks. If a team knows that a player is so good that they won’t last long, well they might trade up to nab that player. On the other hand, a team that doesn’t need any player specifically might be induced to trade their draft place for other goodies.
So let’s take a minute here and talk about money. The money situation is real simple: the earlier the player is drafted, the more money he makes. For instance, the Number One Draft Pick will be the highest paid rookie in the NFL usually with a super high salary and a big fat “signing bonus.” After that First First Round pick, the salaries and bonuses begin to fall in proportion to draft number. Matt Leinhart is a good example of what can happen, financially, during the Draft. He was the quarterback for the USC Trojans in college, a Heisman Trophy winner with a national championship ring. The pundits all agreed in their mock drafts that he was a winner and destined for glory. However, something about his arm strength during the Combine apparently scared enough NFL teams that they began to doubt his staying power in the game. When Draft Day rolled around, he was forced to watch as his stock slipped ever lower. Most people assumed that he would be a Top 3 pick but in the end, he was drafted #10 by the Arizona Cardinals and I’ll never forget what the announcer said. “Just think of all that money he lost!” Because he was a #10 pick, his salary and bonus would reflect his fallen status and the money only falls farther in the later rounds.
I, personally, am a HUGE fan of the Draft, not only because I will watch anything that deals with football but because it is, in my mind, the number one indication of how a team will do the following year. Making good draft choices is an art form. Coaches and GMs who can put together a decent class of rookies for their team are giving that same team a gift that simply cannot be qualified. Research has shown that teams who draft poorly or trade away their draft picks do not do well in the long run. Mainly that situation is due to the fact that they are spending good money on raw talent and then practically giving it away for players that are older and may not be around very long. Let me quickly take you back a couple years ago when the NY Giants won the Super Bowl. In that game alone, the Giants used all 6 of their draft picks from the year before in game-changing plays. And you know what? THEY WON THE GAME! Now, that was a good recruiting class! On the flip side, the Miami Dolphins only won one game all year but if you looked closely you could see that they had traded away all their draft picks from the last 7years. I think you can see where I’m headed with this. Draft Day then, for me, is an extremely vital moment in the affairs of each football team. How they use that day is entirely up to them.
Unfortunately, for me, there is no way to truly give you all the information about every possible scenario that you will see at the Draft. Every year is different and every year teams are looking for different specialty players. 2010 seems to be the year of the defense with a relatively weak quarterback class. We will see though. Just remember that this is no quotidian day of the year for your average football fan—Draft Day really is the pinnacle of expectations and pageantry during the long hiatus between seasons.
No comments:
Post a Comment