As recent as last year, the NFL draft was cool. On a Saturday in April, you could sit at a bar or in your house and watch the first two rounds of the draft. Brownstone Tavern even had ESPN Radio there, and they had a contest where the person who correctly picked the most first-round picks won a 42-inch plasma TV. It's the reason Gregerson knows the name Kenny Phillips. If the Giants had drafted anyone but Phillips with the last pick in the first round two years ago, Gregerson would have another TV. And for Tim Weeser*'s friend Austin, for whom draft day was a second Christmas, his life is more or less ruined. It's clear to me that Roger Goodell was not thinking of Austin when he shortsightedly changed the format.
Beginning (and hopefully ending) this year is a three-day format. The first round will be Thursday night, the second and third rounds will be Friday night, and the fourth through seventh rounds will be Saturday. People are going to watch the first round whenever it's on (although surely it will lose some people to Must See TV and the fact that most wives don't want to watch the draft on a Thursday night). But the rest of the draft? Putting rounds 2 and 3 on Friday essentially during dinner time is a mistake. Bars will undoubtedly still have it on, but it seems to me like there were be a much smaller audience. And rounds 4-7? Diehards watched them before and will surely watch them again, but before they were on a Sunday, when there's always less going on than on a Saturday. Now, who's going to get a group of people together to go to a bar on Saturday to watch rounds 4-7?
On the other hand, with the previous format (1-2 on Saturday and 3-7 on Sunday), you're going to get most of the people watching the first round to keep the TV on and watch the second round. On Sunday, as I mentioned before, there's usually not much going on (sportswise and lifewise), so you're probably going to get a larger audience tuning for rounds 3-7 on a Sunday than you will for rounds 4-7 on a Saturday.
Finally, much of the fun and intrigue of the draft is that the most important two picks for each team were made on one day, and the clock didn't stop between rounds 1 and 2. As one writer pointed out, now the first pick in the second round become a lot more valuable because teams have another 18 hours to evaluate who they want to take. Draft-day trades are awesome, but it's a lot cooler when I'm watching. No Fun League, indeed.
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2 comments:
might this disapproval have anythign to do with the fact the Bears do not have a pick tonight?
Not really. The Bears didn't have a pick until the third round last year, yet I enjoyed watching the first two rounds -- probably because both rounds were on a Saturday, so I was actually paying attention.
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