Ins and outs of the NFL Draft

Compared to baseball, basketball and hockey, football season is pretty short. The best way to pretend to make it longer is obsessing over the NFL draft. Years ago, the draft consisted of each team’s general manager sitting in his office in the middle of the day calling in his picks to the commissioner. Today, people pay to get good seats at the draft.

Teams invest a lot of money to a group of scouts, whose only job is to figure out the draft. Typically, the presumed top few picks are invited to stand and hold their jersey up for the camera. This year however, practically half the players drafted will be there to say ‘cheese.’ Overall, the coverage of the draft this year is getting ridiculous.

So ridiculous in fact, it’s now even going to be spread over three days. The first round will even be in primetime on Thursday night. ESPN will have an entire panel ready to respond to every pick with almost immediate grades.

Their main analyst, Mel Kiper Jr., is famous for two things, his hair and his crazy knowledge about just about every college player that could possibly be chosen. Essentially all he does all year is keep track of college football players so he can be ready for the draft. He’s like the groundhog in Pennsylvania; he hides out unseen by anyone and no one really thinks about him all year until he appears for one day to tell us something only he knows. As crazy as all of this is, it makes sense the NFL draft is more important than the drafts in other sports like baseball.

For baseball, the draft happens right in the middle of the week in the middle of the season. No one watches college baseball, so few people know the best college players. Furthermore, a good amount of the people picked just graduated high school; so even fewer people know who they are.

Even if you do, you won’t see them play for your team for years while they play their way up through the minors. Baseball prospects in the first few years make a few hundred thousand dollars if they are lucky and spend most of their time in motels on road trips in places like Pawtucket.

In football, the draft is now on national television in primetime and watched by millions. The draft order can change at any time through complicated and exciting trades. The players are almost all former college players, some of whom even played in huge national championship games, like Tim Tebow. Those well-known players will be on the field for the team that picks them in the fall and may even make an immediate impact. Mark Sanchez and Shonn Greene, both draft selections last year, carried the Jets to the AFC championship game as rookies.

The year before that, Joe Flacco and Matt Ryan had an immediate impact on the Ravens and Falcons respectively, taking both of them to the playoffs. Since the draft can often have an immediate impact, it does make sense that it’s a big a deal. The most insane part of the draft is also the biggest difference from baseball prospects; how much the new players get in guaranteed money from their new teams. If you had to guess which NFL player last year received the most guaranteed money in his contract in the history of the NFL, who would you guess? Peyton Manning? Nope. Drew Brees? Won the Super Bowl but no. Tom Brady?

Not even close.

The player who received the most guaranteed money in his contract in the history of the NFL was Matthew Stafford, the first overall pick by the Detroit Lions. That’s right, before even throwing a pass in the NFL, Stafford signed a contract that will earn him $41.7 million guaranteed. He could have broken his leg the next day and never been able to play a single game and still gotten $41.7 million. If he plays well and reaches all the incentive clauses in his contract, he can earn up to $78 million over the next six years.

If Sam Bradford, another quarterback and assumed number 1 pick, is taken first by the St. Louis Rams, expect a similar amount of money. He would instantly become one of the highest paid players on the team. This creates a huge salary discrepancy. First of all, despite all the research and the scouting and the weird questions they drill the prospects with, more often than not, early first round picks are busts instead of Pro-Bowlers. Teams who make a bad franchise QB pick are stuck with paying the guy crazy amounts of money for a long time, which makes it harder for the team, which is likely already struggling, to get any better because they have no money.

Even if teams pick well, having really early picks year after year means they are handing out these huge contracts and soon wont have a lot of money left. This happens a lot to teams like the Raiders who have a top-ten pick for the fifth year in a row. Even if they make a good pick this year, which for Oakland is a long shot, the Raiders are still stuck with several astronomical contracts to deal with. Oddly enough, this is the one place where the baseball draft is better. Each pick comes with a “slot,” or a suggested range for the guy to be paid. Teams don’t have to stick to it, but it’s a good guideline to makes sure the salaries don’t get crazy.

Football can and should learn from this to even the playing field for bad teams. Luckily, in the near future there will be a change in the way rookie contracts are negotiated, preventing them from getting any more ridiculously expensive. As insane and as overblown as the NFL draft is, it’s still fun to watch. Most of the time, the “mock drafts” everyone predicts are pretty accurate and the action of the draft actually goes pretty slow. But there are some good stories this year.

Will Sam Bradford go number one? Will Ndamukong Suh be number two? Who will the Pats draft? How many times will they trade their picks for picks in next year’s draft? And what about Tim Tebow? Even if there aren’t any huge surprises, there are some pretty funny moments to watch for. Like a few years ago there was one of the saddest and unintentionally funny moments in the history of the draft. ESPN had Keyshawn Johnson guest commentating towards the end of his career while he was playing for the Carolina Panthers.

When the Panthers picked, they chose a wide receiver Keyshawn knew and said reminded him of himself. He seemed legitimately excited to be the teacher and help the kid learn so he could replace him eventually. A few days later, the Panthers released Keyshawn Johnson. So, basically anything can happen on April 22, at 7:30 p.m., when the St. Louis Rams go “on the clock.” What we do know is a lot of people will be overly optimistic about their team and count down the days until the season starts. Oh, and a lot of college-aged kids will become instant millionaires.

Sean McKinley can be contacted at smckinley@keeneequinox.com