Before I even post any analysis of rounds two through seven, I need to vent this. I need to vent, because the draft is a maddening experience (not "Maddening", with a capital M, but "maddening"; the other one would entail losing control of my mouth and my weight simultaneously, while trying to figure out how how to shove a turducken-stuffed dodo bird inside and emu inside a pterodactyl, nevermind that two of them are extinct).
Yes, I am hopelessly addicted to the draft. Just like any other serious football fan. We yearn for it from the moment the Super Bowl game clock reaches all zeros. Sure, most years we get partially satiated by free agency but, at least for Steelers fans, we don't have all that much invested in free agency. Kevin Colbert, the Rooneys and Mike Tomlin don't build their team that way, except for plugging specifically targeted holes.
It's not that I hate the draft. On the contrary, I absolutely love seeing which players my team gets to sign. But there are a few things that irk me. And you get to read them (lucky you).
1. "Grading" a team's draft
I don't know how far I really need to go with this one, because to explain it in depth would do it justice, and the concept of grading a team's draft does not deserve such attention. To think that, given the myriad variables, anyone can assign a quality rating to a team's draft is absurd. Sure, we can look at Mike Ditka's mortgaging of an entire draft for the Second Coming of Bob Marley, or the Browns drafting Brady Quinn, or anything the Raiders have done since, well, Al Davis was born, and realize that some drafts certainly are better than others.
It's not that all draft classes or all of a team's drafted players are equal to all others. It's that we assign grades before they have played an NFL down. We try to assume how a player will fare in the league based entirely off college game tapes, playing against mostly lesser talent using playbooks that often have a single thing in common with those of the NFL: they have 11 players on each side.
2. The agony of the green room
I was once a member of the press. I was the City News Desk Editor, which garnered me the title of "ambulance chaser." The motto of any editor is "if it bleeds, it leads."
That's exactly why I am no longer a member of the press.
There is enough suffering in this world everywhere we go. Life is hard, plain and simple. I can walk to five desks at my day job and ask their residents how they are doing, and four out of five of them will have some legitimate complaint about their life. So it confounds me when I try to figure out why the press insists on always highlighting that negativity. Sports editors are as bad as anyone else, too. We always get shots of the loser after a championship game, and for some insane reason the NFL allows cameras in the draft's Green Room. I blame Lee Harvey Oswald, for no reason other than I don't know the name of the NFL press director.
3. Next year's mock draft today!
Look, draft prognosticators the world 'round have one thing in common: they are universally wrong. I have taken a stab at my fair share of mocks, and mine turn out as inaccurate as anyone else's. That's because none of us who write those things have any real idea of what a team's front office personnel believe to be their biggest needs. Not you. Not me. Oh, certainly not me. We can all place our bets, but at the end of they day, half of us will bet red, half of us will bet black, and then the ball falls off the table.
And that's just the the mocks create in the hours, days and weeks before the current draft. But, invariably, the day after the draft we get bombarded with next year's mock drafts. Many of them try to be funny by acknowledging they are absurdly premature. But guess what: it ain't funny. Irony is funny. That's not irony, it's just sad. Please, do us all a favor and wait until next year to prepare next year's mock draft.
Now that I have that out of my system, I will return you to my regularly unscheduled sarcasm, dry wit and pointless banter.
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