NFL Draft, NFL schmaft; either way the comet is coming for it; and Rocket Roger's 20K game was 35 years ago today
The NFL Draft is an immoral exercise in planned mediocrity. But sports leagues will keep drafts until their unions and team operators are sued into realizing it hurts the product and the players.
Were ours a more just world, Trevor Lawrence could choose to back up Tom Brady in Tampa Bay this season. You read that correctly.
Cast against some blue-sky thinking, the mind reels at thinking where Lawrence, whom everyone says is the Next Big Thing in quarterbacking, might go if drafts were no more in the NFL and all major pro sports. It has been inevitable since the end of the 2020 regular season that Jacksonville will take Lawrence with the No. 1 overall choice in the NFL draft, which begins on Thursday night. Without a draft, would Lawrence pick a playoff team that lacks a franchise quarterback such as post-Drew Brees New Orleans, or Chicago, where Da Bears have trying to fill Sid Luckman’s leather helmet for the last seven decades?
Lawrence, or another touted quarterback such as Justin Fields or Zack Wilson, could also seek relative stability by signing with Tampa Bay, which will be the first defending Super Bowl champion of the salary cap era to retain all twenty-two starters after proving last season that offensive lines and defensive pass rushing wins championships. He would have a season of learning from Brady and the Buccaneers’ keen offensive minds, Bruce Arians and Byron Leftwich. Instead of picking up pro tips in Tampa Bay, though, Lawrence is ticketed for Jacksonville, where there is nothing to pick up but bad habits, broken bones and chlamydia.1
Favouring “a set rookie-free agency period,” or imagining what would happen if rookies were matched with teams by an algorithm like medical residents are with American hospitals, is wired into a sports hipster’s factory setting. Anyone who writes another anti-draft takes deserves the Congratulations, you just invented College Signing Day!! response.
The rub is that the pro-player arguments are self-evident. The argument against drafts that we need must centre on why doing away with drafts is in the industry’s best economic interest, not the players’. The billionaire class and unwieldy organizations such as unions change their positions when it is in their self-interest, just like you or I.
Sorry, Jerry Jones. You are not the villain, the NFLPA is.
The NFL Draft is a ratings juggernaut, and people continue to watch football even while knowing about the health risks to the players’ brains and bodies and general awfulness that ‘the Shield’ puts into the world. But the true dinosaur that seems to have little idea about any comets headed its way might not actually be the league, but the National Football League Players’ Association.
It is the league’s PA, after all, that has negotiated away rookies’ right to be free of of monopolistic behaviors without getting their consent. The courts have held that, “Abusive business practices that would normally be antitrust violations suddenly become legal if they are performed as part of a collective bargaining agreement with a union.” Foolishly, in 1977 the NFLPA signed off on “agree(ing) to sanction the draft” after James (Yazoo) Smith, a Washington first-round pick whose suffered a career-ending neck injury in his first season, convinced a court that the draft was illegal.
So the terms a player enters the NFL bubble under were set forty-four years ago. That is countless football lifetimes ago. In 1977, offensive linemen were still not allowed to use their hands to block, and pass defenders could bump a receiver all the way down the field, instead of within five yards of the line of scrimmage. That was also 25 years before the discovery of CTE, and the phrase “entrepreneurial mindset” surely had not entered the lexicon.
Smith’s antitrust case focused on money. He argued that he could have negotiated better pay before his career-ending injury. It did not have to do with health and safety conditions specific to playing for Washington, since Daniel Snyder was only three years old when Smith played there.
The comet might come from labour lawyers, and American politicians, who realize they can rattle some cages by “question(ing) the role of the draft system in promoting unsafe working conditions.” The pandemic has tripped the public mood into turning against mega-corporations such as ‘the Shield’ owning everything; we have had our fill of the forty years of right-wing revolution that Adam McKay examines in his Death at the Wing podcast, since the pandemic laid bare what is missing. There are bigger economic issues than the NFL to tackle, but both a centre-left reformer such as Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and some fake populist Republican could be on the same side of wondering why athletes must submit to a system that creates “a suppression of trade.” It is a winning issue on both sides of the aisle in the United States Congress.
College players are making gains with profiting from their name-image-likeness rights. That will show them their actual value. How long will they accept being told where they have to work? Time might run out on that before the NFL’s collective agreement expires in 2030.
The Yazoo Smith of the 2020s or ’30s might be a player who sees his earnings potential get wrecked by being forced to play for one of the league’s perpetual-straggler failson franchises such as Cincinnati, Detroit, Washington or either of the New York teams. You made me go play for the Jets, and look what happened to my face!! I cannot wait to read that statement of claim.
The seed for the doomsday scenario could be what S.M. Oliva, writing for Reason, described eight years ago:
Let’s say Player X is a highly touted quarterback prospect drafted by Team A. What if Team A has a poor offensive line and a coach prone to recklessness with his quarterbacks? Player X can't turn around and negotiate with Team B, which offers a better line and a coach with a stronger record of developing young quarterbacks. Player X is stuck with Team A, and if that means he's out of football after four years, a record number of sacks and a half-dozen concussions, then so be it.
That almost sounds eerily similar to the circumstances 2020 first overall choice Joe Burrow entered in 2020, where he played behind the seventh-worst offensive line in the NFL before suffering a season-ending knee injury. It could also describe any number of high-drafted quarterbacks whose career arc makes one wonder if ‘kill the quarterback’ is the defence’s prime objective or what inept front offices do to their own glory boy, almost as a way of affirming the NFL’s grim next-man-up reality.
The NFLPA argument is that the current system preserves the value of a second contract. But more and more people are aware there is no second contract for most players. That understanding extends to players. Such inquisitiveness is probably not what the NCAA intended when it made rules that football players had to attend and pass classes, but it happened.
That crack about having a quarterback or an offensive line, when made by a Minnesota Vikings fan, kind of tips the second draft-dashing scenario. The economic scale of an NFL franchise probably means that means some disruptive tech giant who would see no need for a draft — Jeff Bezos is not going on anyone’s clock — is probably not going to have the pull to change the rules.
But the super-rich are very good at creating stress and selling a solution, and the proprietors of teams which are stuck in the middle are eventually going to start asking pointed questions about the need for a draft. It could be woke capitalism to say, hey, we do not need this; just let us negotiate directly with rookies and sign the ones whose skills match our needs. A lot can change by 2030.
An assumption that was made when the draft was sealed in place forty-four years ago is that there would always be a bumper crop of football players built right to spec coming out of college every April. That is far from certain when football participation has dropped more than 10 per cent across the U.S. in the last decade.
My Vikings should have beef with the very existence of the draft. Minnesota has the seventh-best regular-season winning percentage since 1970, when the NFL and AFL merged. In that time, the Vikings have never had one of the first three selections in the draft.2 And they have never won the Super Bowl nor have they appeared in one since early 1977, around that time that the NFLPA signed off on keeping the draft while both Randy Moss and I were in our cribs.
For a quick and dirty comparison, let’s tally us up how the Vikings rate against their NFC North division brethren in terms of rank in overall winning percentage, and number of top-10 and top-three selections in the merger era:
Minnesota: seventh in record, 10 top-ten picks, zero top-three picks
Green Bay: ninth in record, 13 top-ten picks, two top-three picks
Chicago: 17th in record, 19 top-ten picks, two top-three picks
Detroit: 30th in record, 24 top-ten picks, nine top-three picks
There is no legislating intelligence, at least not until every NFL team has a BelichickBot 3000 that comes equipped with boundless football knowledge and three distinct varieties of evasive non-answers to media questions. How does it keep up with the news like that?
But that is a snapshot of the athletic capital that gets squandered on mismanaged teams and/or teams that tank. It is time the Vikings were rewarded for their own brand of foolishness, which is trying to compete every season instead of tanking for Trevor Lawrence.
The Vikings should be wondering why they cannot, given their needs, go out and find more blocking for Kirk Cousins or more pass rushers after having the most flaccid pass rush in the NFL last season. A rookie free agent period would mean that they could make a run on offensive linemen and edge rushers, instead of hoping for one or the other with their No. 14 first selection and later-round picks.
Those are two impactors within the NFL: the players coming through a college structure that has been legislated into letting players have financial autonomy, and team investors who are tired of seeing careers go to die in Jacksonville. That’s not even accounting for which league will pull the trigger on abolishing the draft, making the NFL look stale by comparison. The league will have to swing with the times, even on its own favorable terms that the PA will inevitably grant them.
So, I take it you are not watching the NFL draft?
If the draft is part of your football ritual, please enjoy it. I am not here to harsh on anyone’s joy. The first round of the draft usually just does not offer me much, since the Vikings seldom pick early. The draft has seemed consequential exactly three times in the last 25 years.
1998: I had been hearing things for a couple of years about a wunderkind from West Virginia, Randy Moss, from Rand U by way Marshall University. Moss was my dude once I read that Notre Dame would not take him. I was hoping like hell he would not be drafted by the Dallas Cowboys, and he famously fell to the Vikings at No. 21 due to the racist tropes that are revived before every draft. And that happened.
2014: The Vikings were interested in a quarterback, because Christian Ponder. So it was hoping-against-hope that they would draft any QB who was not Johnny Manziel. Manziel went to the Cleveland Browns; enough said. The Vikings drafted Teddy Bridgewater. And he never blew out his knee in 2016, and a season later, the Vikings became the first team to win the Super Bowl in their home stadium. Remember that 41-40 thriller against New England? What was Belichick thinking by going for the two-point conversion and the win with no time left and then calling a play where Julian Edelman tried to throw a pass to Brady? Hubris wears a ragged hoodie.
2020: Last year’s draft felt welcome since it was the early days of the pandemic when actual sports were paused. The Vikings added wide receiver Justin Jefferson, who went on to break Moss’s rookie receiving records.
Sportslit Segue — 29 April
Roger Clemens officially began staking his claim as the best pitcher in baseball history on this date in 1986, when he became the first to amass 20 strikeouts in nine innings of one game. Strikeout rates in MLB have spiked over the last 3½ decades, and it still seems like a mark that can be matched but never surpassed. Clemens did it a second time in 1996 before anyone else did it. Only three others — Kerry Wood, Randy Johnson and Max Scherzer — have matched it.
The best way to read Clemens from afar — which is the only way we really have to read athletes these days now that they are bubbled behind “a phalanx of handlers” and curated social media feeds — probably comes from the commentator Charles Pierce. In 2003, writing for Slate as Clemens closed in on an anabolics-accentuated quest for a 300th career win, Pierce noted that the great pitcher was baseball’s “Last Great Flake … most truly a throwback in that he is both a towering talent and a towering eccentric.”
Reading that humanizes Clemens, who always seemed like the Goliath that no one rooted for, even for those two weird seasons when he played in Toronto after bolting from Boston because he said he wanted to play closer to his native Texas. (Just nod and pretend you understand.) He should be seen as an artist first, even though he did more of that robotic stat-compiling than almost everyone else who has got on the bump since 1947. (Clemens is first among integration-era starting pitchers in Wins Above Replacement, first in Adjusted Pitching Runs, third in strikeouts and fourth in Adjusted ERA+.3)
An artist’s work reflects their times, and the truths that shapers of the official history would prefer to paper over. Clemens and Barry Bonds are not in the hall of fame since they are the DHs — designed hairshirt-wearers — for the so-called Steroid Era. There has always been amorality since humans started playing games and keeping score — if you ain’t cheatin’, you ain’t tryin’. Rules without enforcement are not really rules at all, and the lack of teeth in Major League Baseball’s steroid policy in the 1990s signalled tacit approval to the players. It should not have been a shock that Bonds or Clemens, two hypercompetitive perfectionists, would have both sought out ways to avoid the decline phase and maintain their skills into their 40s. It would have only been a surprise if they had avoided it.
Too honest by half ... I know!
Both will be in their final year of eligibility in 2022. (If the sportswriters need to stick it to someone, there is always Curt Schilling, who seems eager to get up on the cross even though we really need the lumber.)
Clemens was not tapped for stardom from the age of 12. Jeff Pearlman’s The Rocket That Fell to Earth: Roger Clemens and the Rage for Baseball Immortality (HarperCollins, 2009) is especially valuable for understanding Clemens’s humble early life and choices he made that aided his long-term athletic development. Sure, there might be a night where Jacob deGrom racks up 21 strikeouts — draw a circle around a Colorado Rockies-New York Mets four-game series in late May — but there will never be another ace like Roger Clemens.
Lastly but not least of all
Freezing Cold Takes has a long thread of bad football takes.
Speaking of drafts in leagues that need to be taken down to the studs and rebuilt, the Ontario Hockey League is holding a draft lottery and a snake draft. Make your jokes about the London Knights getting the first choice. Given how the draft has usually gone, London would probably prefer to pick back-to-back at the end of Round 1 and start of Round 2.
Any remotely positive-seeming news about women’s pro hockey is welcome. The NWHL says it is going to double its salary cap for next season.
That is more than enough for today. Thank you for allowing these words on your screen, please stay safe, and be kind.
Granted, a NFL player is just as vulnerable to the latter in Tampa Bay. More so even. It is Florida.
The Vikings picked hall of fame offensive tackle Ron Yary No. 1 in 1968.
Relievers Mariano Rivera, Hoyt Wilhelm and Dan Quisenberry also have a better career adjusted ERA+ than Clemens.