When you are a football fan, the Super Bowl represents both the best and worst day of the year. The best because you get to watch the spectacle that is two teams playing for one of the most coveted titles in sports. The worst because it comes with the realization that it will be seven excruciating months before meaningful football will be played again. The NFL off-season begins the day after the Super Bowl. Black Monday, the day following the game, often sees anywhere from a handful to sometimes a dozen coaches fired. Soon, contracts will end and many players will become free agents able to negotiate deals to leave their teams for greener pastures. Then comes the weekend in April that seems like Christmas, Easter and Thanksgiving all wrapped up into one great weekend, the NFL Annual Player Selection Meeting, otherwise known as the NFL Draft.
What is it about a bunch of men sitting in suits selecting college football players that make football fans giddy? The Draft is a ratings bonanza for the four letter network (ESPN), but why? At its very core, the Draft would seem to be a boring event but there it is dominating the ratings every year. NFL.com reports that the 2014 draft was watched by 45.7 million people, a staggering number for a group suits selecting young college football players for their teams. What makes the Draft's success even more bizarre is that it now comes during the NBA and NHL playoffs. Here basketball and hockey is playing games that will help determine their champions and an off-season cattle call of new football players will dominate the sports landscape for three days.
A big part of the reason the Draft does so well is that it is an event that is tailor made for television. Teams will have, and often take, ten minutes to make their selections in the first round of the draft. The ten minutes means that while the next team is deliberating their selection, there is ample time for the analysts to pick apart each pick and what it means for their respective teams. Members of each team's fan bases can work them self up into loving or hating the picks, which allows for a flurry of activity after each selection. The potential for trades also factors in as the inner fantasy sports manager in fans allows them to obsess over every little possibility. Once all is said and done, millions of sports fans will watch the Draft with rabid interest as their favorite teams spend three days trying to improve their fates by hooking their fortunes to a group of twenty year old young men. Literally millions of dollars will be made in that three-day span as 253 young men hear their names called and realize their dreams of playing in the NFL.
If it sounds like I am writing this to be critical of the process, you could not be more wrong. You see, I am a die hard Dallas Cowboys fan (with a name like Dallas, how could I not be), and I will be watching with bated breath on Thursday hoping to god that my team makes the smart pick and selects Ezekiel Elliot with the fourth pick of the draft. I am one of the 40+ million that will be watching the Draft and I am completely OK with that. How long is it until the start of preseason?
