Why the NFL Draft Is Unstoppable, Even Now – The Wall Street Journal

Football’s draft, which kicks off Thursday night in Cleveland, is the biggest, most beautiful gas factory in all of sports, a monthslong blabby-blab blab-a-thon in which well-sourced experts, armchair fans and mediocre sports columnists at financial newspapers compete for the right to be wrong at least 50% of the time. A power company could charge the nation with the hot air annually expelled in the weeks leading up to this event—who’s moving up; who’s moving down; who’s the hot pick; who’ll pull off a draft-day heist for the ages. Nobody really knows! And the jargon: You’re not an official draft guru unless you’re tossing off buzzy terms like “arm talent.” Arm talent! What does that even mean? Are the football cognoscenti now evaluating the skill of a solitary arm, disembodied from the rest of the human being, like The Thing in “The Addams Family?” Isn’t arm talent like, just, you know, throwing? 

It doesn’t matter. Get it right, get it wrong, the draft is a huge deal, really an optimal event for these times, a windy feast of gossip, cherry-picked facts and baseless speculation—America’s second, third and fourth favorite past times, after screaming at each other on social media about pandemic face masks. In the information-is-everywhere era, the draft has turned marvelously democratic: You don’t need to be decked in Brioni on TV to have a sizzling, or even smarter, take on BYU quarterback Zach Wilson, Ohio State quarterback Justin Fields, or the current, allegedly-surging quarterback darling, Trey Lance of North Dakota State. You don’t have to be able to finish a 40-yard dash to have profound wisdom on the proper 40-yard dash time for an NFL player. All you need is access to a computer. And a mouth.

If you’re doing it right, you’re talking in circles now. The draft is barely hours away, so by now you’ve talked yourself in and out of every outcome, and then talked yourself in and out of every outcome again, and maybe once more. Every possible trade has been picked apart and rejected, then reconsidered and re-assembled anew. Even the people who will be in the official war rooms seem headspun and exhausted. Here’s San Francisco coach Kyle Shanahan, responding to speculation about whether or not his club will select a quarterback, pushing out current starter Jimmy Garoppolo: 

“I can’t guarantee that anybody in the world will be alive Sunday, so I can’t guarantee who will be on our roster on Sunday.”

With the third pick in the 2021 NFL draft, the San Francisco 49ers select Friedrich Nietzsche, from Leipzig University! 

America can’t get enough of this. Unlike the Oscars, or lots of other television entertainment in decline, the draft is surging: last year, the NFL held its draft during peak quarantine, its coaches in their own sterile rec rooms, commissioner Roger Goodell sequestered in a sweater in his basement, and the event still set all-time ratings records. There’s something addictive about the hopeful energy, and the viewing options—you can choose to watch a deeply nerdy telecast, with stat breakdowns, or another one with lots of ooey-gooey human-interest back story, or you can simply sit on Twitter and watch the Bears fans panic. I used to never understand how anyone could sit through hours and hours of the draft. I’ve surrendered. The draft won. 

Besides, the draft is reliably absurd. Part of this is the comical surge in specialist/expert culture—there are quarterback oracles, leadership oracles, and “game speed” oracles (“game speed” is different than “timed speed”) and probably someone who can talk to you for three days straight about punting. But it’s still football, and for all the proprietary algorithms and wonky argot like “catch radius,” there’s still a fair amount of old-fashioned locker-room groupthink. Are you a football guy? Are you coachable? Are you a first-one-in-last-one-out? Or are you more of a last-one-in-first-one-out? Answer carefully! Millions are on the line. 

Probably the funniest example of draft brain gone amok was the micro-controversy a few weeks back over Clemson’s Lawrence, a proven talent who gave an interview to Sports Illustrated in which he dared to suggest he didn’t need gridiron glory to be happy, and sounded a little too well-adjusted for the draft world’s taste. The overheated reaction was, basically: DOES TREVOR CARE ABOUT FOOTBALL? Lawrence actually had to clarify the comments, stating that he did, indeed, care. “I love football as much or more than anyone,” Lawrence tweeted. “It is a HUGE priority in my life.”

He will be No. 1 on Thursday, deservedly. From there, the Jets are expected to take BYU’s Wilson, and then it’s over to the uncommitted Niners, and hopefully, chaos. I’m happy that Cleveland is getting a public event, but I’m a little sad the NFL is bringing back the industrial shine; I liked Goodell in his sweater and all the folksy touches of last April’s Zoombound affair, which made a bombastic league feel quite a bit more human. I’ll still tune in, however. As ridiculous as it is, I love the draft as much or more than anyone. It’s a huge priority in my life.

Write to Jason Gay at Jason.Gay@wsj.com