{"id":678495,"date":"2026-05-18T11:23:17","date_gmt":"2026-05-18T11:23:17","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/678495\/"},"modified":"2026-05-18T11:23:17","modified_gmt":"2026-05-18T11:23:17","slug":"the-mystery-and-mass-appeal-of-the-n-f-l-draft","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/678495\/","title":{"rendered":"The Mystery and Mass Appeal of the N.F.L. Draft"},"content":{"rendered":"

Nystrom also told me about a player who was not the draft\u2019s most promising prospect but was among its most intriguing: Tyren Montgomery, a wide receiver from John Carroll University, a Division III school that hadn\u2019t had a player drafted in thirty-five years. (That player was the 1991 draft\u2019s final selection, a distinction affectionately known as Mr. Irrelevant.) Nystrom researches the draft tirelessly, keeping a spreadsheet of data (ages, game stats, hand widths) on nearly two thousand players, and publicly ranks his top five hundred\u2014nearly twice as many as will actually be drafted. But in January, when he attended the Senior Bowl, an all-star showcase of draft prospects, Montgomery was unfamiliar to him. \u201cI know everyone,\u201d Nystrom told me. \u201cI\u2019d never fuckin\u2019 heard of this guy.\u201d<\/p>\n

Nystrom, who has an M.F.A. in nonfiction from the University of Iowa, was struck by Montgomery\u2019s trajectory: he had only begun playing football in college, but at the showcase he had stood out against surefire early-round defenders. He now had a chance to be picked in the draft\u2019s later rounds, where draftees typically have to fight to make the team but occasionally become starters or even stars. \u201cYou have this wide band of outcomes,\u201d Nystrom said. \u201cHe\u2019s new to the sport, comes from D-III, but we just saw him lick a bunch of top-hundred prospects.\u201d Such is the draft\u2019s central allure: a player might amount to nothing. But he could also become anything.<\/p>\n

For a league that is run by some of America\u2019s most fervent capitalists, the N.F.L. has an odd relationship with free markets. These days, teams\u2019 payrolls are capped and the league\u2019s revenue is shared. The goal is to create competitive parity, or at least the appearance of it\u2014to sell the idea that on any given Sunday any team can win. The draft was the league\u2019s first step in this direction. In 1935, the owner of the then sad-sack Philadelphia Eagles grew tired of better teams scooping up all the best players, and proposed the draft as a remedy. For some reason, the better teams agreed. It began the next year as a simple affair, with coaches smoking cigars in a hotel room and scrawling names on a chalkboard. This year, Mendoza was in line for a four-year contract worth nearly sixty million dollars, whereas, in 1936, the No. 1 pick, Jay Berwanger, a running back from the University of Chicago, turned down a contract for a thousand dollars a game and never played professionally. Instead, he went into rubber and plastics.<\/p>\n

In 1980, when ESPN was not yet a year old and was desperate to partner with major leagues, the network proposed to Pete Rozelle, then the N.F.L.\u2019s commissioner, that it televise the draft. \u201cPete started laughing his ass off,\u201d Steve Bornstein, a former ESPN president, recalled. As the longtime Sports Illustrated writer Peter King told me, Rozelle \u201cthought it would be embarrassing, because nothing effing happens.\u201d But Rozelle agreed, and ESPN set out to make an event of it. \u201cThe higher-ups said, \u2018If this thing is not working, make a graceful exit and get off the air,\u2019\u00a0\u201d Bob Ley, who anchored ten drafts for ESPN, told me, of that first TV draft. It aired on a Tuesday morning, and mostly consisted of guys placidly chatting at a desk. The action shots were of men making unheard phone calls in the New York Sheraton ballroom. \u201cIt\u2019s like the difference between Edison\u2019s first kinetoscope and the latest movie at the Cineplex,\u201d Ley said, comparing the draft then versus now. \u201cTechnically they\u2019re part of the same family of entertainment, but just barely.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"Parents<\/a><\/p>\n

\u201cLet\u2019s have another kid so she can have someone to play with.\u201d<\/p>\n

Cartoon by Jeremy Nguyen<\/p>\n

That year, ESPN aired eight hours of draft coverage (amazingly, only the first third of the draft\u2019s selections), a number it gradually increased until it began televising every pick, over the course of two days, in the mid-nineties. It had discovered what now feels obvious: at the nadir of the football calendar\u2014three months after the Super Bowl, three months before preseason games\u2014fans hunger for even the idea of the sport. \u201cSports fans have an amazing ability to seem to care more about the future than the present,\u201d Daniel Wann, a psychology professor at Murray State who focusses on sports fandom, told me. \u201cThey live in a world of unknown.\u201d Uncertainty and anticipation are central to dopamine release: the countdown to vacation, the planning of a perfect party, the thrill of the chase. It\u2019s fun to watch your team win. It can be just as fun to hope they will, and to imagine how. \u201cIt\u2019s theatre of the mind,\u201d Nystrom told me. A colleague of mine once likened it to football fan fiction.<\/p>\n

The most transformative change to ESPN\u2019s coverage came in 1984, with the addition of Kiper, the ur-draftnik. A few years earlier, he had quit community college to compile and sell draft guidebooks out of his parents\u2019 Maryland basement. He was sharp and sharp-looking, with a vaguely avian face beneath a dark pompadour, and was doggedly dedicated\u2014year-round\u2014to a subject with which few in the media even engaged. When a team drafted some linebacker from Appalachian State in the fifth round, Kiper could offer a torrent of assessment. \u201cBefore we had the flashy graphics and pre-produced research packages, we had Mel,\u201d Ley said. Writers have likened his Baltimore-tinged, auctioneer-like patter to \u201ca breathless cross between machine gun and Morse code,\u201d and have described him as having the \u201cmind of a savant beneath the immovable coiffure of a lounge act.\u201d Chris Berman, one of ESPN\u2019s earliest anchors, told me, of Kiper, \u201cI didn\u2019t know anybody like this existed.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Nystrom also told me about a player who was not the draft\u2019s most promising prospect but was among…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":678496,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[559],"tags":[64,63,5275,593,6450,85,327010,327009],"class_list":["post-678495","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-nfl","tag-au","tag-australia","tag-magazine","tag-nfl","tag-onecolumnnarrow","tag-sports","tag-textbelowcenterfullbleednocontributor","tag-the-sporting-scene"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/678495","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=678495"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/678495\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/678496"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=678495"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=678495"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=678495"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}