The NFL Has Been Very Unfair to Our Beautiful Quarterbacks

The idea of attending an NFL draft seems like one of the most nightmarish sports-associated experiences a person could have. I can’t imagine spending hours on my feet listening to Roger Goodell bleat out 70% of a teleprompted sentence, waiting in a 45 minute line for a porta potty, or weathering the threat of getting accidentally getting bonked in the head by a ferula wielded by someone dressed as the Arizona Cardinals Pope who is in a drunken shoving match with someone dressed as the St. Louis Rams Hulk while a band blasts a saxophone-heavy cover of Lose Yourself. The fact that the draft was held this year at the hellmouth of Lambeau Field only made the entire enterprise seem even more unbearable.

And yet, the NFL draft maintains a mysterious and embarrassing hold over me. Every year I write about how stupid and ridiculous the draft is and every year I let the entire thing wash over me like a Lake Michigan wave on a water quality alert day. I am not a Draft Guy either– I don’t pore over mock drafts or look at highlights or listen to draft podcasts, and I’ve never heard of most of the players even in the first round unless they are Big Ten guys who I watched obliterate hapless Northwestern players. I have absolutely no idea how nor any interest in figuring out whether a good college player will turn out to be as a pro by looking at his Sudden Jumpability or Elite Pad Placement, or any of the other bullshit that NFL draft analysts spend all year inventing to say that a guy is big, strong, or fast except with the stilted argot of a police report. I also have no patience for the manipulation of “draft capital” and “value.”

What I love about the NFL draft and what will keep me watching is that I am addicted to the production. It will never stop being funny to me that the stentorian goofballs who treat the NFL like it is a branch of the United States armed forces and not a sport where enormous people run into each other and then do crotch pumps have been put in charge of putting on an NFL fan convention. Every decision is baffling to me. The new innovation this year was putting players waiting for their names to be called in little patches of fake yard and then having them walk down a hallway that was long enough to be a Get Smart sight gag– I was mildly disappointed that no draftees decided to run down the hallway, fall down, and start clutching their knee as a bit. I also enjoy rubbernecking the crowd who are drunkenly booing the concept of the New York Jets while a person wearing a necklace featuring a New York Jets fan license plate looks on with the pained vaudeville expression of a professional wrestler hearing his rival’s theme song; this is the same way I enjoy the local TV station that for some reason broadcasts the New Year’s Eve celebration at the Rosemont Hilton every year to delight Chicagoland audiences with the swaying grandees of the northwest suburbs. I also really like the ESPN the pick is in noise.

This year’s draft featured a slightly less psychotic presentation than years past: there were no orangutans manipulating ipads or circus performers getting stuffed into a barrel while NFL films music blared over highlights over a linebacker from the University of Utah. The most exciting thing happening other than a band that I would describe as charmingly wedding-adjacent playing the hits of 2003 was that they kept cutting to fans from sites of international games and I got to hear a French person say the word “linebacker.” But they did not need any of that because ESPN and the NFL got handed a Major Draft Narrative.

This year, the entire draft centered on the fall of Colorado quarterback prospect Shedeur Sanders from a consensus that had him getting picked late in the first round in that zone where quarterback-desperate teams eventually lose their minds and trade up for an obvious bust– this time it was the Giants hoisting themselves back into the first to grab Arnold Schwarzenegger Pronunciation Icon Jaxson Dart– to the fifth round, where he was picked by the perennially disastrous Cleveland Browns.

The Sanders fall, which also involved the dullard son of the Atlanta Falcons defensive coordinator trying to hoodwink him with a ponderous prank call, became the main topic of the draft as analysts tried to explain why teams continued to pass on Sanders. As this happened, sourced-up reporters began to leak vague details of Sanders’s lousy attitude in interviews, his substandard “board work” whatever that means, and his unwillingness to participate in predraft workouts and bowl games in a way that reminded me of the plot point in the deranged Kevin Kostner movie “Draft Day” where he declines to pick a quarterback because of Character Concerns after learning that his teammates did not go to his birthday party.


One of the funniest examples of Hollywood Ball Knowing Failure is that in the movie draft day the projected number one quarterback is coming from the University of Wisconsin

But the issue that loomed largest for Sanders was his existence within the greater Deion Sanders media ecosystem. Any team that drafted Sanders risked invoking the ire of his father, who has a red hotline-style phone that goes to live on air to every braindead ESPN Yak Show. To NFL teams, Sanders’s “off-field” issues threatened coaches and executives with something much worse than players who have been accused of things far more odious than having a pain-in-the-ass celebrity father– the ability to potentially get them fired from their phoney-baloney jobs.

Mel Kiper, Jr, spent the entire draft in an extended meltdown over the Sanders fall after he had him listed in his top five. Kiper, whose famous hair has been engaging in a years-long retreat to higher ground on his scalp so it now looks like he is wearing a greased Magneto helmet, railed against the NFL as ignorant about the Quarterback Position. He fumed. He ranted. He whined about how the National Football League was being very unfair to Sanders, very unfair and in fact it’s a disgrace in the now-ubiquitous cadence of every aggrieved septuagenarian television creature that is the sole cultural legacy of the president of the United States.

Kiper’s deranged three day long psychotic break on ESPN’s draft presentation raised the question of what he is even doing there. I don’t think anyone even in the very silly world of Draft Knowers takes anything he says seriously and his own jeremiad against the NFL’s ability to evaluate quarterbacks instantly brings reminders of the times he has stuck his neck out for some of the funniest draft busts imaginable. Kiper remains on ESPN television as an NFL Draft mascot, a sort football muppet who can instantly talk about a college player’s Motorability or Jump Rate for five minutes without blinking, so it is very funny when he throws a nuclear tantrum about how the NFL is being very unfair to our beautiful quarterbacks for what is like six cumulative hours or television.

Every year after the draft, Mel Kiper is admitted to a clinic for removing all of the moths and flies that have flown directly into his mouth and are trapped in his body in a painful seven hour procedure

The Chicago Bears used their first three picks on a tight end, a wide receiver, and an offensive lineman. These players will reinforce a coterie of new offensive linemen hired from free agency and the Bears’ new head coach, who has a reputation as an offensive mastermind. The changes from the Bears have led some pundits who think that you can use rational thought to analyze the Chicago Bears to believe that Ben Johnson and these new players along with lauded quarterback Caleb Williams can lead to them having a functional and coherent offense. I disagree.  My contention is that they are the Chicago Bears and are doomed to have a sisyphusian Bears-style offense that depends on fumble returns from linebackers for eternity or at least until the National Football League is banned either for either being a brutal death sport or for not being fascist enough for the United States government in the near future.

I DON’T WANT TO ALARM YOU BUT THERE’S A NORTHWESTERN GUY IN THE LITERAL NBA PLAYOFFS

Something crazy happened when I tuned into the NBA’s All-Star Saturday Night program to watch spindly car wash inflatable Matas Buzelis represent the Bulls in the rookie/sophomore tournament. Former Northwestern guard Pat Spencer, the Man who Once Played Lacrosse himself, showed up in the same tournament as a member of the Santa Cruz Warriors. Northwestern sort of had a player in the NBA.

The Wildcats have not had consistent representation in the NBA since Evan Eschmeyer got drafted by the New Jersey Nets. A few players have appeared here and there: Reggie Hearn got a few minutes for the Pistons, Vic Law played for the Magic in the Disney Bubble, Scottie Lindsay and Chase Audige have been floating around in the G League, and Boo Buie briefly held a two-way contract with the Knicks but has not yet made it to the Association. But there was Spencer in a vaguely All-Star-adjacent event for a national audience.

I am pretty surprised that of all the players to pass through Welsh-Ryan in the decade or so that Northwestern has fielded a few pretty decent teams that the guy I am now watching in the NBA is Pat Spencer. To be honest, I had sort of forgotten about Spencer, who had led Northwestern through a single, forgettable eight-win season. Spencer was a novelty, a guy who was surprisingly good for someone who did not play college basketball at any level before being flung into the Big Ten meat grinder but probably would not start for any Big Ten team other than Northwestern. Spencer’s 2019-20 team features a lot of players who would eventually be pretty good– Boo Buie, Pete Nance, Robbie Beran, and Miller Kopp were all on the team, but they were all freshmen (except sophomore Nance) and needed some time to develop into the bones of the teams that would eventually make the NCAA Tournament. Buie showed some early signs by going off for 26 in a loss to Michigan State; it would not be until the next season when Boo Buie would begin regularly torturing Tom Izzo into a sputtering beet-red reverie.

 

Pat Spencer is the only person in the world who has played with basketball legends Boo Buie and Stephen Curry

Spencer eventually joined the Warriors and I started seeing him in occasional garbage time in actual NBA games. But I had not noticed that he had made the Warriors roster until I started to see him appear in playoff games as part of Steve Kerr’s desperately expanding rotations. Spencer was materializing in competitive minutes. He was on the court with Steph Curry. He was getting screamed at as he was frog-marched by security off the court at the Toyota Center for throwing a light NBA-style headbutt at Rockets center Alperen Sengun.

It has been very funny to see the reaction on the internet to Pat Spencer. Spencer, who now sports a Performance T-shirt under his jersey and for some reason a combination of stubble and bushy mustache that makes him look like a nineteenth-century saloon keeper, has been running around and scoring buckets using a clumsy looking jump hook, leading to a lot of social media comments perplexed by his entire deal and characterizing him as a pickup player. He wears number 61. The announcers have been working overtime talking about his storied lacrosse career every time he is on the court. 

Pat Spencer has shown his barber a picture of a guy ducking under the bar as soon as the piano player starts hitting diminished chords

Northwestern’s NBA footprint remains minimal. The ‘Cats have not had a player drafted in the twenty-first century, and they have not had a player who has been an NBA regular since Billy McKinney in the early 1980s (Rex Walters also had a meaningful NBA career in the 1990s, but he transferred to Kansas for his last two seasons, so I am not sure how he fits as a Canonical Wildcat because I had absolutely no awareness about the existence of Northwestern basketball when he played). I am not sure I would have picked Pat Spencer as the first Northwestern player attracting any sort of attention as an NBA player in 20 years, but perhaps a mustachioed Jud Buechler-style bench guy whose most interesting attribute is the fact that he did not play basketball is the most accurate representation of Wildcat men's basketball to the broader world.

THE CUBS ARE GOOD AND FUN AND ARE DESPERATELY HOPING THAT YOU DON'T THINK ABOUT THE MONEY YET

The Chicago Cubs made a trade in December for the best player they’ve rostered since Kris Bryant won an MVP, and then they went into the season with some of the worst vibes imaginable. This is because every year around the annual Cubs convention Tom Ricketts decides tp put on a barrel with suspenders and go on the radio to lecture fans about how he and his billionaire family are boiling and eating shoelaces in the hopes of affording another 35 year old utility guy on a minor league deal. Ricketts was lambasted by the national media about this– to the extent that the Cubs have come up in conversation at all in the last few years of their metronome-like 83-win finishes it was every media member involved with major league baseball mocking the Cubs for not spending money.

Starting in 2015, after the Cubs finished the teardown that saw them become unbearably bad and cheap as part of Theo Epstein’s rebuilding plan, the Ricketts family started to spend big money. The Cubs took advantage of the fact that their core players were all young and cheap and spent at the top of the free agent market. It seemed for a few years that if the Cubs wanted a guy, they got him, luring top players like Jon Lester, Ben Zobrist, Yu Darvish, and Jason Heyward. They had joined the Red Sox and the Yankees as a Serious Big Market Team. Then, after 2019, they stopped. They traded Yu Darvish for a group of teenagers, let beloved slugger Kyle Schwarber leave, and began unloading the world series players and bringing in unknowns who were distinguished mainly by the paucity of their paychecks. This was during the partial pandemic shutdown, when Ricketts began squawking about “biblical losses” and people started appearing in Cubs uniforms with names like “The Romine Brothers” and “Johneshwy Fargas” like barnstormers from far-flung AAA teams.

The Cubs gave up a lot to get Tucker including phenom Cam Smith, third baseman Isaac Paredes, and Hayden Wesneski who is the best pitcher I have ever seen at bellowing FUUUUUCKKK after giving up a massive dinger, but it has already paid off. Tucker looks like an MVP candidate and gives the Cubs a hitter that teams are afraid of. But the conversation around Tucker in Chicago is dominated by money. He is a free agent after this season, and it looks like he could command nearly a half billion dollars in his next contract. The Cubs under Jed Hoyer, whose own record in free agency is largely throwing up his hands and  saying “too rich for my blood” while loading up on washed up veterans on low-cost contracts who end up getting released three months into the season, have not come close to looking like they are willing to pay it. For some reason, the Cubs had to play the Dodgers seemingly once a week for the first month of the season, and it almost felt like Tucker would at some point in the middle innings start wearing a Dodgers uniform. Almost no one believes the Cubs are willing to pay Tucker whether they work out an extension before the season or if Tucker enters the free agency market. The Cubs seem no longer to be in the superstar business.

It is impossible to tell what Tucker is thinking. I have watched a fair amount of Tucker interviews from the time the Cubs traded for him and even for a baseball player he seems devoid of personality. Tucker insists that behind the scenes he is capable of having a conversation; ESPN had to run an entire article about it where Tucker goes on record to claim that he is "decently outgoing." I don’t blame anyone in the spotlight who chooses to go about their business wearing the armor of cliches and nonanswers, and if Tucker doesn't want to ever say anything interesting into a microphone, that's his prerogative. And in that way, Tucker fits in with the rest of the Cubs, an outfit that seems to prioritize bland players. The team right now has about three guys who seem to have any discernible personality, and two of them speak to the media exclusively through translators. But even in this beige, staid bunch Tucker stands out. I love having Tucker on the Cubs and I will be elated if the Ricketts family somehow decides to dip into their billions to pay him and maybe even the dreaded Luxury Tax. But this dude makes Nico Hoerner look like Rickey Henderson.

Kyle Tucker, pictured having the best time of his entire life

The Cubs have been very fun this season. Tucker has been amazing, Suzuki is knocking the crap out of the ball, Pete Crow-Armstrong looks like a superstar and the most fun Cubs player since prime Javy Baez. They are stealing a million bases. Their veteran backup catcher is inexplicably putting up small sample Barry Bonds numbers. Their bullpen is horrendous, and they have somehow had to comeback from down ten runs repeatedly, the already shallow rotation has lost its two best pitchers, including having ace Justin Steele out for the season, and third base remains a black hole. But for now they are fun and I guess we will have to wait for the offseason to see how content with mediocrity the Ricketts family is willing to remain.

The NFL Draft Reaches Its Deranged Apotheosis in Roger Goodell's Rumpus Room

The NFL Draft is already the most absurd spectacle on television, a slurry of brands and military hardware and grim self-serious analysts solemnly intoning that a player has tremendous instincts and sideline-to-sideline speed but might not have the SIZE and LENGTH to contribute right away in the NATIONAL FOOTBALL LEAGUE, but the fact that we are all sealed in our homes during a terrifying pandemic meant that NFL was going to reach operatic heights of absurdity.

For weeks leading up to the draft, we had heard about the technical challenges.  There have been stories about how GMs are converting their houses into Draft War Rooms, installing nuclear submarine defense infrastructure to their suburban mansions and complaining about the possibility of rogue cells waging Cyberwar against their zoom conference calls even though, as far as I can tell, the entire infrastructure of drafting involves being able to pick a name off a list and make a few phone calls.

The WNBA had done its draft with few hiccups a few weeks earlier, and everything had more or less worked out.  The show cut between commissioner Cathy Engelbert, a small ESPN crew of analysts, draft picks in their homes, and reporter Holly Rowe interviewing them.  There were a few glitches-- several draft picks had not been told to mute their televisions or use headphones so we got the classic sports radio situation of needing someone to scream "you gotta turn down your radio" at a person although these are professional athletes and not a mustache guy in the middle of proposing a baroque series of trades to reacquire Robby Gould, but watching the players at home celebrating with their families was very charming.  The NFL saw this and decided to brand its version a Virtual Draft; the GM of the Detroit Lions made his IT guy live in a Winnebago outside his house in case some villainous hackers decided to break into the Lions' mainframe and gain the incredible draft intelligence that the Lions were targeting shitty football players.

The NFL draft included a solemn introduction from Roger Goodell who wanted to talk about These Uncertain Times.  Goodell lives for this.  He seems to see the NFL as the nexus of brands and a nebulous form of American patriotism involving tanks, and the solution to every crisis is a sluice of ads showing concern over triumphant piano music.  Goodell's ideal response to a global catastrophe would be to fuse members of the military into exoskeletons made from the Official Pickup Truck of the NFL to shoot at the virus with laser guns while Domino's Pizza solemnly remembers the fallen.  They started the draft with a performance of the National Anthem and then cut to a TV monitor full of people who had painted their faces to look like footballs.

Goodell, standing in a rumpus room decorated with carefully curated knickknacks, was not up to the task of whatever he was trying to accomplish. His wooden bearing reminded me of the famously cadaverous Chicago-area lawyer Peter Francis Geraci who has been haunting UHF airwaves since the mid-1980s or a hapless Vice President of Ketchups thanking the Sun Belt Conference for participating in the Amalgamated Condiments Bowl.  His face was red as a sockeye salmon. He later changed into a sweater and then, on day two, managed to slip into a focus-grouped easy chair.  The whole setup reminded me of one of those Sally Struthers correspondence school infomercials. 

The business of the draft itself remained hilariously mundane.  This is because the essence of the draft remains a televised list reading.  In many ways, the virtual draft served as a more normal televised event than usual because most of the insane spectacle of the draft involved packing thousands of people into a Bud Light Draft Zone where they can stand in line to do the drill where you have to run through tires with your KNEES UP DAMMIT or to don jerseys and scream at picks that they have absolutely never heard of before Goodell would come out flanked by another group of military personnel.  

Some of the weirdest parts of the draft involved attempts to awkwardly recreate the live experience.  Goodell invited fans to boo him via zoom.  Before every pick, Goodell would bring up a small smorgasbord of teleconferenced fans in full team regalia to cheer the picks while he goaded them in a  manner that can best be described as executively.  The fans were barely visible and audible; even though ESPN has rebranded as the network that lets Michael Jordan say "fuck" or even Scottie Pippen, it is not going to let some guy in an elaborate, homemade Los Angeles Rams headpiece bellow one out on national television in front of you, the Commissioner of the National Football League, and God.

The other change from the draft is that it brought us inside the homes of NFL coaches and general managers and dozens of draft picks. This provided us with several shots of goatee guys in team-branded apparel doing some action packed texting in carefully-prepared draft areas where they could ostentatiously display as-told-to books by football players on Leadership or revel in Kliff Kingsbury's palatial opulence, or even cut to Mike Vrabel allowing his rowdy, mulleted sons to operate a carnival of the bizarre in the background.  ESPN's analysts also set up at home except for Mel Kiper, who appeared to have transported himself into a 1990s CD-ROM game.

The draft's attempt to straddle the line between bone-crunchin' football action and solemn discussions of the global pandemic and concurrent economic crash was handled in the same ridiculous and ham-handed way that the NFL handles anything but talking about football and the same ludicrous ways that corporations are maneuvering to continue selling things.  Every few minutes, the draft would give way to a series of identical commercials about These Uncertain Times; the eerie repetition of that phrase and the attempts by Taco Bell to show resilient heroes grasping their taco boxes has put us all into a George Saunders short story.

And yet, in its own moronic way, the NFL draft did provide a useful service this weekend.  Along with ESPN's Bulls documentary, the draft served as a vaguely sports adjacent thing to put onto television that millions of people would be watching and you could follow along and make dumb jokes with all of the other people who like to do the same thing on the internet, and if that meant having to endure a quavering Goodell invoking The Power of America and Specifically Football In These Uncertain Times and to watch as the Bears picked a Notre Dame Guy and no one took anyone from Northwestern then so be it.

The NFL Draft is the Strangest Spectacle on Television

At least the Super Bowl, the NFL's great spectacle of football and bizarre halftime entertainment and people huddling in house parties to see how a truck is going to be sold to them does surround a football game-- one that decides which team gets rings, the parade, and a special on NFL Network where one of the available Baldwin Brothers will growl-narrate how that tough loss to Carolina in Week 10 was the turning point of the season that brought them together.  The NFL Draft, though, is the league's greatest achievement in Verhoeven spectacle, a three-day extravaganza of people reading a list of football players that subsumed no less than three entire television networks full of suit guys screaming made-up words like ELITE EXPLOSION-FACTOR.  The NFL brings out former players to yell about the picks, along with inspiring children and military personnel; eventually it devolves into inexplicable, demented skits such as this one about murderous hail of footballs:

You don't bring a 🔫 to a 🏈 fight...Congrats, Hakeem!#CardsDraft

📺: Today on NFL Network, ABC and ESPN pic.twitter.com/F2kU4hSKaD

— Arizona Cardinals (@AZCardinals) April 27, 2019

The NFL Draft is so compelling to me because it is the NFL distilled to its essence.  The Super Bowl represents the NFL making its case as an institution woven inextricably into the American fabric, an unavoidable event that has turned itself into a secular holiday and must hold everyone's attention with things that Americans unequivocally like: musical extravaganzas, commercials where animated animals blast farts at each other.  The draft, on the other hand, is an even weirder phenomenon, a bizarre and arcane morass of scouting and salary cap esoterica involving amateur players that 95 percent of the audience has never heard of; the NFL has willed this into an unfathomably popular avant-garde television program.  The NFL has done this because the NFL exists in a strange bubble where the NFL draft and its celebration of tape-eating and incomprehensible scouting lingo and screeching about "elite measurables" and "questionable attitude" because a college player wore a coat or headbutted someone is the most important thing in the world. 

The NFL draft is extremely popular.  It exists on network television instead of broadcast on close-circuit television in a grubby OTB next to some depiction of that ubiquitous internet drawing of monkeys swordfighting unfolding in real life.  Thousands of people filled the streets of Nashville for the event in garish face paints to react in triumph or agony or, after the first round, general bemusement since they've never heard of the vast majority of the players and so they just do some generic football yelling.  Fans gather in bars or even their own stadiums to watch the draft on television solely, as far as I can tell, to generate internet memes when their team reaches for the wrong quarterback.  Few things in the NFL draft will ever be as funny as when the Bears invited Mike Glennon to their official draft party so he could watch them trade up to select his replacement before he sheepishly bobbleheaded his way out of there in embarrassment. 

When you're blindsided by Trubisky

Why is the NFL draft so popular?  I have no idea. The Internet Style Guide suggests I should simply take my own bizarre reasons for watching this and throw a "we" in the headline so I could write something like "We Watch the NFL Draft for The Excesses of Grotesque, Corporate Pageantry And Also To See Who Will Select Clayton Thorson" or, even better, "Stop Watching the Draft So You Can Write About It At Length for your Blogspot Website." 

The Philadelphia Eagles select Clayton Thorson in the fifth round in the 
background of a Street Fighter II Guile Fight

Part of it, if I were to venture a guess, comes as a part of the NFL's imperial domination of American sports discourse.  Part of it also comes from the excitement of player selection, where fans who support the lowest, shittiest teams can look at 45 seconds of some fifth-round guy shredding MAC defenses who had a very impressive time in the Cone Drill and imagine him doing the same thing to the Cincinnati Bengals.  And part of it is because even though a very small number of people watching have any sort of mechanism to scout players even by the dubious methods used by professionals, a consensus emerges before the draft about the top players and it is very fun to collectively mock teams for departing from it.

A TAXONOMY OF FOOTBALL TALK

My favorite part of the draft is its bizarre argot.  Not only does the NFL draft have its own stupid and incomprehensible jargon where very serious men with tie knots the size of an infant's skull come up with a dumber way to say that someone is big or fast, it also incorporates all of the numerous and idiotic ways people talk about football and sports in general in the twenty-first century. Here is a brief taxonomy:

1. Football-Knower lingo that is used by television personalities who have spent so much time around football that they have no idea how normal human beings talk and by non-professionals who really want everyone else to know that they have seen the All 22 footage.  The greatest exponent of this is Jon Gruden.  There's an old profile of Gruden from the New Yorker most notable for the impossibly ludicrous New Yorker diaresis dropped on the phrase "offensive coördinator" that details how he gets up at 3:17AM to spend hours and hours in a storage shed watching tape to prepare for his broadcasts in order to explain to viewers that (chuckle) lemme tell ya, this Peyton Manning is a heckuva quarterback.

2. Scout Talk about Motors, and Get-offability, and all of that nonsense.  A few years ago, the word they kept using was "sudden," which was a genuine literary invention-- you can imagine Mel Kiper, Jr. reading from a new short story to his writer's workshop "It only took an instant for the clouds to break over Richard 'Dreadnought' Grench's face or for a joke to curdle into a sulk. He was sudden--just like his swim move that let him lead the Big Twelve in Quarterback Hurries before the plantar injury against Baylor."  The weirdest thing about Scout Talk is when they start sizing up player's bodies by talking about "adding to their frames" and doing Butt Phrenology.

Every year, they come up with a sillier and more abstract way of saying the same thing but invent clumsy new term to make it sound more technical and complicated.  The NFL loves sounding technical and complicated.  Football fans love when their Football Men do Football Talk.  The result is a David Mamet play breaking out in between footage of some Big 12 receiver scoring touchdowns and mascots standing underneath a fighter jet.  I genuinely wonder what these draft expert goofballs are like outside this milieu, whether their bromides about twitchy motors is just some schtick they can turn off or whether they spend all their time bellowing at each other about elite get-off moves in diners or when being fitted for enormous pin-striped suits.

3. Advanced Stats analyses that exist mainly to throw cold water on the Scout Talk and to remind everyone about how essentially random the draft can be while simultaneously peddling numbers that actually correlate to draft success.  The Advanced Stats dialect exists mainly to heap scorn onto general managers who select quarterbacks based on them being tall and having strong jawlines and to explain that ninety percent of what happens in a football game is luck and will eventually regress to the mean.

4. Dumb Guy Analytics, which is when square-headed Football Guys clumsily try to repackage their anodyne Football Guy insights as some sort of advanced stats like when you get one of the infinite varieties of Trents Dilfer donning an extra large accounting visor and standing quizzically in front of a chalkboard that says Trent's Advanced Stats while he comes up with Quarterback Wins.  This is one of the best things about football and should only be encouraged.

5. Asset Chat that is part of the financialization of all things sports. The new buzzword in the NFL draft is Draft Capital.  The idea that drafting is far more random than the TV guys want to think and that the best strategy involves just getting as many picks as possible makes sense.  At the same time, the invention of complex charts about pick depreciation and analyses that examine the draft based entirely on byzantine pick swap strategies all read like this clip of a professional wrestler who is also wearing head-chainmail for reasons I have no interest in exploring:


There are plenty of other insane things about the NFL draft-- the militarism, the overwhelming and preening presence of Roger Goodell even as he gets showered in boos, the draft's devolution from ludicrous self-seriousness to bizarre skits, the inevitable and wearying tedium of the draft's final day-- but none of these things can ever be as strange and inexplicable as the existence of the draft and its attendant spectacle itself.      

The NFL Draft Was Insane Enough and Then They Added Orangutans

Every 1980s future dystopia movie that takes place roughly now reveled in showing sports that have moved in parallel with the  government's inevitable slide into shoulder-padded, neon technofascism by transforming into an increasingly perverse spectacle of violence, consumerism, and some combination of motorcycles and jetpacks.  Yet even the most hysterical Damon Killian I'd buy that for a dollar money-shaking flamethrower thunderdome wrought from the most cocaine-addled, seagull-coiffed producer has yet to match the gloriously stupid spectacle of the NFL draft.

The NFL draft was silly enough when it involved a depressing hotel conference center filled with football and television personnel who had all simultaneously purchased the worst suit on the market.  Now, the National Football League has taken over entire cities, paralyzed roads, developed filmed skits, brandished as much military hardware as a minor Soviet civic holiday, and filled public squares with thousands of boo-thirsty spectators, all whom have traveled from their homes to hear a three-day list of potential football players, most of whom will be cut before a single game is played.

The overwhelming pomposity of the draft-- Roger Goodell's masterclass in unwarranted swaggering, the conflation of the NFL with a branch of the United States government, the collision between spittle-flecked football guys who want to amend the US Constitution to give them the authority to order hamburger drills on any citizen and Ted Talk-conditioned corporate brand managers, the development of a bizarre NFL draft argot that mixes adjectives that have never been used to describe a human being before with the way that the cops talk on the television show COPS-- these are things I discussed on this blog last year and have been noted more eloquently by competent writers capable of writing normal-length sentences.

The novelty of this year's NFL draft been to take all of the normal draft bullshit and add a bunch of insanely stupid nonsense to it.  It's not enough that the draft includes punishing hours of highlights, inane draft patter, slickly-produced human interest stories, and Mel Kiper's 1980s dystopian sportscaster haircut.  They've now interspersed skits involving stiff former players bravely battling teleprompters and mascots and contest-winners from globe-spanning satellite links. When you tune into the draft only to see Mark Brunell, acting with the natural flair of a man trapped for decades in a 19th century diving apparatus rusting at the bottom of an ocean, pretend to find the name of a fourth round pick on the bottom of a golf ball, it is mind-boggling.
 
A lucky NFL fan tries to find the Texans' sixth round pick in a mockup of a 
pus-oozing Brian Cushing nose
 
Anthony Walker, who fulfilled a dream to finally hear his name called at the NFL draft, had his name picked by a disconcertingly tech-savvy orangutan.

I know that this is probably the most You Maniacs sports blog on the blogspot.com platform 
if not the entire internet, but this is literally a Planet of the Apes inflection point so please do 
not take it lightly when I caption this GIF: YOU MANIACS 

The NFL draft serves, even more than the Super Bowl, which eventually has to shoehorn in a football game, as the apotheosis of the NFL experience.  The NFL's combination of spectacle, self-seriousness, and complete inability to register absurdity even as they introduce zoo animals to interrupt an analyst grimly explaining whether or not a football player is a football player who can play football in the national football league has become more compelling as it has gotten more ridiculous.  Why not have Goodell ride into the draft on top of a tank?  Why not have former players reveal picks only after going on a global scavenger hunt for clues-- imagine Rex Grossman, sent to reveal the Bears' fifth-round pick from an Egyptian tomb before surfacing weeks later in the Luxor, the victim of a gang of international baccarat hustlers?  It is only a matter of time, because idiots like me continue to watch the draft move further into Paul Verhoeven territory every year because the Bears might trade a bunch of picks to get that quarterback from North Carolina, are you kidding me?   

BOOK REVIEW: THE CUBS WAY

It took 108 years for the Cubs to win their last two World Series titles, which is the approximate amount of time it would take to produce the effluvia of Cubs merchandise that we've seen in the past several months using 1908 techniques.  The city of Chicago has been deluged by enough hats, shirts, commemorative DVDs, and books to dam up the Chicago river and once again reverse its flow into Lake Michigan to flood the water supply with festive holiday dyes and excrement from the Dave Matthews band tour bus.

Crews dye the Chicago River blue to celebrate the Cubs' victory.  They did 
not, as far as I know, dye it for the Sox win because it would have looked  
like a Cecil B. DeMille plague  

It is perhaps unfair to lump Tom Verducci's The Cubs Way with the various picture books and other cash-in products that have devoted thousands of words to asking the discerning reader hey do you remember the Cubs won the World Series.  Verducci, a long-time baseball writer for Sports Illustrated and part of Fox's television crew in charge of reminding Joe Buck that Jon Lester does not throw to first, has a far more important mission in mind, which is to ask hey do you know how the Cubs won the World Series.

There's been a tend since Michael Lewis's Moneyball for sportswriters to zero in on teams with cutting edge strategies.  This subgenre gets away from the anecdotes and personalities of the team; the star of these books is spreadsheets and the men who program them.  Verducci struck gold on the Cubs as the ultimate Process Book-- a historically moribund team bereft of talent and laden with a mystical aura of failure is seized by a spreadsheet savant, headed by a quirky manager, and finally wins a championship for the millions of desperate fans, many of whom will be ready to purchase this book.

Verducci focuses on Cubs President Theo Epstein, and he clearly intends The Cubs Way to read as a sequel to Moneyball.  Teams had caught on to Billy Beane's stunning revelation that baseball players should get on base and his acolytes, including Epstein himself, had proliferated throughout baseball unleashing a new order via slide rule.  Epstein, like all of the other analytically-minded baseball executives had been to the baseball monolith and found that all of the other apes now had bones of their own.  Verducci couches Epstein's attempt to drag the Cubs and Cubs fans out of their peasant superstitions and eschatological playoff watching techniques into the familiar quest understood by anyone who follows baseball post-Moneyball: the Search for the New Inefficiency.

Epstein has decided that one of the new inefficiencies is a player's personality and ability to mesh with his teammates.  The revelation came after the collapse of the 2011 Red Sox, which became mired in infighting and vendettas as the team swooned out of the playoffs.  Epstein, according to Verducci, vowed to move beyond the statistics to get players who would not only play well but play well together; Verducci never quite explains how that philosophy involved the eventual acquisition of Jon Lester and Jon Lackey, masterminds of the Red Sox' beer and chicken fiasco that became the emblem of the problems on that team.  

The fall of the Red Sox due to chicken, beer, and clubhouse gaming is one of the dumbest
baseball hysterias of recent vintage and I can't get over this CBS news graphic, it looks like
Lackey is about to take a Power Glove from a metal briefcase

The emphasis on player makeup did not evidently extend to Aroldis Chapman, who proved that Epstein's emphasis on character included exceptions for people who can throw 103 miles per hour. Verducci does discuss Chapman's ghoulish domestic violence arrest and suspension from baseball as well as the Cubs' bungled attempt to pretend they had soul-searching discussions with him to justify their trade. Here is how Verducci and Hoyer making up some bullshit how Chapman getting upset because he thought he had blown a World Series somehow redeemed him:

[Chapman] arrived as a flamethrowing mercenary, whose behavior in a domestic dispute compromised the buy-in for some fans of the joy teh Cubs gave them.  No longer did those fans face the potential conflict of watching Chapman secure the end to the biggest championship in sport.  By failing, and doing so to the point of physcial and emotional exhaustion, Chapman became more humanized to a fan base just getting to know him.
"When he comes back in 5, 10 years or so for some anniversary party," Hoyer said "he's viewed in a very different way-- in a very positive way.

The other star of The Cubs Way is Joe Maddon.  Maddon, the self-consciously quirky manager who took the microbudget Rays to the World Series, immediately bonded with Epstein over their desire to find new edges and invent homilies.  For example, the team adopted the slogan "that's Cub" to preach the proper way to do things throughout the organization and then decided to clumsily retrofit it into an acronym: "C stands for the courage 'to do the right thing,' even if it's scary or uncomfortable; U is for the urgency 'to do the right thing right now; and B is for the belief 'that we can do it.'"  That is a viscerally horrifying sentence.

Maddon and Epstein's new techniques include mental skills training, using software to train players in pitch recognition.  These types of things will soon travel across baseball, where the St. Louis Cardinals will subject their endless supply of 5'1" guys named Squeaks to simulated reenactments of the farming machinery accidents that have claimed all of their relatives in order to turn them into onbase machines and master cybercriminals.

Cardinals infield prospect Sport Winkelous learns how to identify forkballs and to imprison 
rival front offices in their stadiums by turning a network of smart toasters and networked 
refrigerators into a remorseless cyber-army

There's very little in The Cubs Way that will surprise anyone who has followed the Cubs or even baseball generally. The floundering Cubs, bought by a wealthy family, hire Epstein and allow him to strip the team of anyone capable of playing major league baseball while the Cubs acquire prospects by trading anyone who plays even moderately well, draft sluggers with the high draft picks that they hoard as a reward for profoundly sucking, and hire Joe Maddon to coordinate pajama-themed road trip costumes-- this is a story that has become as integral to a Cubs television broadcast as footage of the Named Cubs Playoff Catastrophes and satanic goat imagery.   

The Cubs Way will not upend anyone's thinking about the Cubs or baseball or Anthony Rizzo's nude shadowboxing rituals.  It will not likely change anyone's opinion on Joe Maddon as his Joe Maddonness, complete with an annotated lineup card featuring "proprietary numbers," spills unchecked across the pages.  The Cubs Way is a fine and straightforward process book by an experienced and plugged-in baseball writer that I will probably re-read multiple times and then watch the World Series video until the authorities find me suffocated at the bottom of a pile of Cubs merchandise.

NFL Draft

The NFL draft weekend is over, the NU picks have settled, and the collective brains of football fans have recovered after the severe neurological strain of being shouted at by pundits in flashy suits who will all be proven wrong as soon as the first snap of the NFL preseason begins. The draft has evolved from the comfortable atmosphere of a back alley craps game in the league's early years to a Vegas style revue missing only the show-girls and unexpected tiger attacks. At the center of everything is ESPN's ringmaster Mel Kiper, Jr. whose Big Board has only slightly less power over the fate of young men than General "Buck" Turgidson's.

The sweater invites you to the
World of Make-Believe while the
hair invites you to a world of
brutal gangland debt collection

The NFL draft is so compelling for a number of reasons. Unlike basketball, hockey, or baseball, the NFL is basically it for worldwide professional football. Baseball, basketball, or hockey players have a much wider network of minor leagues or foreign pro leagues as occasional fall-backs. NFL washouts can play in Canada, which is not quite the same game. The Arena League is on hiatus and NFL Europa no longer exists, although I liked the classy move of changing the name to "Europa" because the American pronunciation was the thing keeping Europeans from watching World Bowl 2001 MVP Jonathan Quinn. The NFL also has just the right amount of rounds. While baseball has dozens of rounds, with very little chance of seeing even highly touted prospects for years, the NBA has only two rounds, with bad teams essentially risking the team's future on each first-round pick.

The differences between the MLB and NBA drafts encourage vastly
different strategies

The NFL, on the other hand, has the perfect amount of rounds, allowing for both high-profile draftees expected to make an immediate impact and guys that you try to talk yourself into over the whole summer who will often be heartlessly cut after appearing for five minutes in a preseason game and then forced to wander from door-to-door in dusty Texan hamlets offering to mend fences or perform cone drills for a bowl of gruel or a lift to the nearest slow-moving freight train junction. When high profile picks bust, they inevitably work third shift at a garage door factory in Russia, Ohio.

The scouting aspect of the draft is so fascinating because of the way performance at drills at the combine or on a pro day can greatly raise or lower stock. Of all of them, nothing can make or break a prospect like the 40-yard dash, which does not seem to be a particularly effective judge of 90% of what happens on a football field. If anything, offensive linemen should be graded up for a slower 40 speed for my amusement since the only time they run 40 yards at a clip at maximum velocity is on some broken play that involves them comically lumbering down the field with a the terrified wide-eyed look of an undercover cop who has gone too deep and now has to kill his partner in cold blood in order to prove his loyalty to the maniacal head henchman of a drug kingpin.

The obsession with the 40 time is chronicled in Rough Draft, where Clay Travis, a 28 year-old former lawyer turned sportswriter, joins a bunch of players in training for the 2008 draft combine. The trainer, Kurt Hester, has observed that speed is valued much higher than strength in the combine, and the prospects know that mere tenths of a second separate them from multi-million dollar signing bonuses and falling from the draft altogether. Travis shows that the 40 and all of the other combine drills are skills in and of themselves, and that succeeding in them has only an ancillary connection to football skill. Hester is also portrayed as a lunatic Cajun who travels everywhere on a fanboat and talks like Paul Prudhomme, except that he would use a blend of Cajun spices to blind a wild boar before beating it to death with a floppy fat guy hat.

Occasionally, to get a high school team fired up when they're training in his Louisiana gym, Hester releases wild alligators he's caught in the swamps in the weight room. He's put camouflage tape around the alligator's mouth, but the kids don't know this and go wild thinking the thrashing gator is about to attack them. After he's gotten them fired up, Hester sprints across the weight room, pulls out a knife, and stabs the gator in the head with a large hunting knife. He did this before a Louisiana high school football game recently, his team was playing a team nicknamed the Gators, and the team he trains won by four touchdowns. When I tell Eastern Michigan defensive end Jason Jones this story in the locker room a few minutes later, Jones nods, "That's a good idea," he says.

Of course, most teams take things other than 40 speed into account when drafting a player, but its importance is almost certainly overvalued. Especially if you are Al Davis, who appears to get a list of players based only on 40 time and a special Raiders psychological test where players are subjected to hours of watching footage of balcony rants and rambling old person stories.

The Raiders' special combine evaluation procedure tests endurance and mental fortitude

NORTHWESTERN PLAYERS AND THE DRAFT

No NU players were drafted this year, although three went as undrafted free agents to the NFC North. Tyrell Sutton chose the Packers after receiving numerous offers. John Gill will be a Lion. Gill had some momentum going into the draft, even being identified as a potential sleeper in a Dallas newspaper. Most excitingly, Eric Peterman will reunite with Brett Basanez on the Chicago Bears. Before announcing the signing, Angelo noted that the Bears had found a pretty good receiver in their own backyard, and he was not talking about Jeff Samardzija. The Sun-Times, when not extensively covering Mr. T's jury selection as a lead story on their website, has also reported that C.J. Bachér will attend a tryout for the Bears along with Missouri's surplus Chase and Florida's Drew Weatherford.

"If you're innocent, I'm your best man," Mr. T told the reporter
lucky enough to get this monster scoop. "But if you're guilty, I pity
that fool." "You've got to testify! Tell somebody about it. God is good!"
he told an admirer as he tried to leave the building. "I pity the fool
that don't get it." Mr. T then apparently spent the next 3 hours
reminding state employees and passers-by that he indeed pities
fools in case anyone had forgotten over the past 25 years.

THE BEARS DRAFT

The Chicago Bears' draft has been overshadowed by Jay Cutler trade and the lack of any first day picks. I've never seen any of the Bears' draft picks play except for Juaquin Iglesias and Henry Melton. Melton remains a BYCTOM favorite for his play as an enormous bowling ball of a running back during his freshman and sophomore years at Texas before converting full time to defensive end. He formed part of an enormous running back arms race with Texas A&M, who unleashed Jorvorski Lane upon the world.

Although they tried to recruit even bigger backs than Melton and Lane, recruiting
violations forced the Horns and Aggies to stick with normal sized running backs

The Bears also took another Vanderbilt player in corner D.J. Moore, which could put as many as five Commodores on the Bears roster, exacerbating a well-established trend. In crucial Vanderbilt news, Cornelius Vanderbilt was locked in corporate warfare with James "Diamond Jim" Fisk and Jay Gould in the Erie War over control of the Eerie Railroad during the 1870s. Gould became so desperate to control the landlord that he turned to a British con-man who was apparently so confident in his swindling activities that he adopted the impossible name "Lord Gordon-Gordon." When Gordon-Gordon escaped to Canada with more than $1 million of Gould's money, the jilted titan of industry formed a small band to personally extradite the confidence man by kidnapping him. Instead, Gould and his merry band was arrested by Mounties before he could escape with Gordon-Gordon. The arrest of Gould and his men and subsequent denial of bail by the Canadian authorities led to an international incident between the U.S. and Canada. As the Manitoba Historical Society relates, Minnesotans prepared to go into battle for their incarcerated countrymen:

The situation in the United States was reaching a high state of tension. The St. Paul Pioneer of August 1, contained a heading, "Our People Should Make Ready," denouncing the crime committed by the corrupt and venal Canadian authorities and advised putting no obstacles in the way of the Fenians should they decide to move upon the colony in force. If any other plan should he preferred, it should be well matured, but there should be no delay in preparation. "It should be swift, silent and terrible."

Gordon-Gordon escaped from Gould's bearded wrath by melting into the
background disguised as a typical nineteenth century American

The Bears also took wide receivers Johnny Knox and Derek Kinder, who will stand in Peterman's way at camp, Buckeye linebacker Marcus Freeman who has been described as the Lance Briggs to Laurinaitis's Urlacher, and finally the alliterative duo of tight end Lance Louis and safety Al Afalava from San Diego and Oregon States respectively.

With football season still months away, expect to hear very little about any of these picks unless one of them gets horribly injured or arrested in Canada with a threat of Fenian raids as retribution.