For years, I was as brainwashed as anyone by the NFL’s version of the sorting hat. The draft was the ultimate offseason experience. The great bastion of hope for a brighter future, for every NFL team.
Then, during the lockout, NFL Players Association attorney Jeffrey Kessler explained that, in the absence of a league-wide union, the draft is an antitrust violation.
At first, I didn’t want to hear it. Over time, I started to like the sound of it.
As explained in one of the 100-plus essays in Playmakers, the draft is fundamentally anti-American. Thirty-two independent businesses come together and control the entire labor market, parsing out employees based on a system under which the most inept of them get dibs on the best of the players.
My 86-the-draft take has been dubbed derisively as a “crusade” by others in the media, whose relevance and income are coincidentally tied to its ongoing existence. And I’ve come to accept the simple reality that, over the past decade, the draft has become too big to die.
Understandably, then, I nearly fell out of my chair this morning when Peter King (making a return for the full two hours of PFT Live) suggested that the draft could go away in our lifetime. Personally, I don’t buy it — but I like the sound of it.
The folks at AwfulAnnouncing.com typed up the key quotes so I didn’t have to. Peter’s broader point is that, if the draft would at some point go away, the NFL would come up with something to replace the draft. And that thing would become as big, if no bigger.
At some point, I’ll lay out my idea for how talent would be distributed in a way other than rewarding the worst teams with the best players. Maybe this weekend, when things will be slow. If things will ever be slow again.
For now, I won’t rule out the possibility that the draft will die. While the NFL enjoys an antitrust exemption by virtue of its multi-employer bargaining unit, the current chief executive could tuck an elimination of that law in the next iteration of the big, beautiful bill. Or maybe the union would shut down in the face of the next lockout, and not settle the ensuing antitrust litigation.
However it may play out, it’s not impossible. Peter thinks it’s very possible. And while that will rile up many who are under the honor-and-a-privilege spell, the NFL would find a way to make a post-draft existence work — and to make whatever replaces it the league’s biggest offseason event.
