This weekend marks ESPN's 27th time televising the NFL draft. So I don't care how well you argued for your high school debate team, the discussion about the logic and the wisdom of devoting so much air time to this exercise in pick-'em-up has been closed for a while.
More people probably know who Mel Kiper Jr. is than they do Kenneth Lay.
(I think Kiper has Lay going in the seventh round to the Arizona Cardinals.)
"If there's any event that typifies how far we've come as a company, it's the NFL draft," John Wildhack, ESPN senior vice president, said in a conference call this week.
Between ESPN (tomorrow, noon to 8; Sunday, 11 a.m. to 6 p.m.) and ESPN2 (tomorrow, 8 p.m. to 10 p.m.), the network is carrying 17 hours of people waiting for teams to pick players, guessing whom they'll pick and second-guessing whom they picked.
OK, I simplified it a little.
"There's so much that appears to be known, but is unknown ... so much intrigue," Wildhack said.
As Marvin Gaye sang, believe half of what you see and none of what you hear. ESPN's plugged-in NFL reporter, Chris Mortensen, surely agrees - though without quoting Motown.
"It's absolutely a minefield," he said. "I see NFL teams using all the [media] venues. I find myself suppressing some of the information. ... I'm dubious and leery of what some teams are trying to plant."
(Dubious and Leery? Didn't they record a couple of singles for Berry Gordy?)
ESPN won't have the draft telecast to itself this year. The NFL Network also is carrying the event. But Wildhack said that won't make things so different, even with the NFL Network crew set up just 75 feet away in Radio City Music Hall.
"There's always been competition with the draft ... in various media platforms over the years," he said.
(Media platforms? I think I had a pair of those in the 1970s - blue and white with four-inch stacked heels.)
With ESPN's 26 years of televising the draft, those in football have come to recognize it is the platform. Jay Rothman, ESPN senior coordinating producer, noted how Shawne Merriman, the Maryland product coming off an impressive rookie season at linebacker for the San Diego Chargers, approached the network to get a role in its telecast.
"We used to have to recruit hard to get players," Rothman said, "not now."
Nonstop picks
