The NFL Draft is like watching other kids open Christmas presents that suck. After all the mock drafts and blow-harding by the same experts year after year what you end up with as a fan is a big fat zero. Mock Drafts The most asinine of all endeavors. Where and when did it become not only important to guess what player will go where, but then grade yourself or others on how accurately they guessed? To what point? The teams themselves don't read mock drafts. The players selected with the first ten picks are so obvious you'd have to be under a rock not to guess them. I guess if you're anxiously waiting for the next issue of Coin Flip Quarterly a mock draft is right up your alley but for most fans it's an irritation we can live without. If you made up or read an entire seven round mock draft, get help. The First Round The stuff dreams are made of. But if you do a little research you'll find the gulf between the first ten picks and the next twenty-two is bigger than the Grand Canyon. Take QB's for instance, in twenty-years no QB taken from 11-32 has made the Pro-Bowl except as a spectator. Of the forty-plus QB's taken in the 1st round, 3 have won a Super Bowl and if your last name isn't Manning that number dwindles to one. Running backs taken in the 1st round #### out faster than a Yugo. Yet the 1st round mystique endures. Look at Andy Reid & the Eagles, he's backed the team out of the 1st round two years running because he knows what nobody will say out loud, if you don't have that #1-10 it isn't worth overpaying the 1st round bust. So do the math; Matt Ryan, (#3-Falcons), has a 7% chance of winning the Super Bowl in his entire career. Joe Flacco, (#18-Ravens), won't even make the Pro-Bowl. The Combine This is where the intense navel gazing pays off for the experts spewing out the raw sewage that gets lovingly crafted into countless mock drafts. Every year some combine darling vaults into the 1st round. This year's darling, Ohio State one-year-wonder DE, Vernon Gholston, charmed his way onto the Jets who wasted the 6th pick in the draft on him. Those wacky Jets, how they keep their fans from killing themselves never ceases to amaze me. You'll hear Gholston's name over and over for the next ten years whenever anybody is talking draft busts. I'll take a side order of Kyle Brady with that... Offensive and Defensive Linemen Did anyone get the same feeling I did they were watching the same film clips over and over? Behemoth crushes QB or RB, behemoth blocks for QB or RB. Is there a studio that just churns these mind numbing clips out all year long? Then you get the inane banter and dribble leading into the dullest thing ever saved on video, a clip of their combine workout. Never have little orange cones played as big a role in entertainment. Millions of people watching fat guys gallop around tiny cones. Excitement, Excitement, Excitement The draft has all the suspense of waiting for a bus on a rainy day. You're glad when it arrives but soon after you're crammed next to a guy that smells like a wet dog. The NFL draft provides the same experience when your team picks an unknown, undersized fill-in-the-blank player bracketed by two "Can't Miss" prospects who go onto Hall of Fame careers...couple this with mind numbing commercial breaks, thanks Tiger for inventing water with even more electrolytes in between winning golf tournaments in space, and you have two days of must not see sports TV. Holding Up the Jerseys With the number they were drafted. Please for the love of God we know you'll give them a uniform, it's a league rule, stop this awful practice. Grading the Draft The same knuckleheads that couldn't guess who got picked where are trotted out to #### on the teams who didn't listen to them to begin with. This is like asking a psychic to tell the future right after all the things they said would happen didn't. Simple fact is some of these guys will be very good players, some OK and not so surprisingly most are training camp cannon fodder. Next year I'm going fly fishing and I'm pretty sure sitting by a creek trying to outwit a fish can't be any less interesting than watching the NFL Draft.
