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The NFL doesn’t recognize limits to hype and spectacle.
This is a league that’s sold tickets to Super Bowl Media Day for several years (and people actually buy them!). It’s a league with a stadium under construction that will include a 100-yard bar, and something called a fantasy lounge. It’s also a league that cares little about watering down its product, and will force an expanded playoff bracket on us in the near future. We’ll complain at first, and then happily devour more football.
The hype machine’s exponential growth is most evident with the NFL draft. Once territory for only the league’s oldest and football nerdiest boys club, the draft has exploded into a truly remarkable and all-consuming entity.
In 2014 a record 32 million people tuned in to watch the first round, a football event that didn’t contain any actual football whatsoever. The draft is a primetime extravaganza spanning three days that bridges the gap between two of America’s steamrolling athletic giants: the NFL and NCAA.
But when, exactly, will we reach a critical mass for the draft, and a point when hype can’t possible match public interest? When will Mark Cuban be right? And when will the NFL’s attempt to control the sports landscape deep into the offseason result in an over saturation?
I’m not sure where the exact point of diminishing returns lies. But in the search for one we can start here: Having all 32 teams and both draft broadcasting networks (NFL Network and ESPN) setting up shop outside at Grant Park in Chicago for this year’s draft.
That’s really going to be a thing, according to NFL Senior Vice President of Events Peter O’Reilly, who spoke to ESPN earlier this week. The networks and teams will have a footing both inside at the Auditorium Theater, and outside. The football-loving public will then gather at Grant Park and also be immersed in something called “Draft Town”, where they can run the 40-yard dash against various players on a video screen while also doing the standard autograph hounding as former players roam the premises.
For the first time ever teams will also make their picks outside in tents along Michigan Ave, which will be dubbed “Selection Square.” Those picks will then be relayed inside
It’s the sort of organized NFL lovefest that sounds like wicked fun until you’re there wondering why you didn’t just watch the draft at home. Or why you’re not doing anything else at all.
It’s important to remember some basic geography here. If you consult any sort of digital map (or go old school with a globe), you’ll note that Chicago is a northerly city. As such, the weather in late April/early May ranges from pretty alright to not exactly glorious. As Yahoo’s Eric Edholm notes, the average daily rainfall for Chicago in April is 0.67 inches per day.
Nothing about standing in a cold rain to watch Roger Goodell call out names and embrace repeated hugs sounds like fun.
This is your NFL, a league that is quite literally in this case unable to contain itself, and is spilling out far beyond the boundaries of one building. All to celebrate a draft in which the vast majority of players selected will amount to little or nothing.
The Grant Park festivities will surely be well attended, mostly because at this point the NFL could hold such an event on Mars and screaming fans will arrive. And as an event, the draft has morphed into far more of an entertainment enterprise than an actual conversation about football.
There will be a focus on TV ratings once again this year. Records will be broken again, and there will be plenty of bodies in Grant Park. But numbers matter less here than an advancement toward a saturation point.
Eventually even the NFL will get there, and it’ll be pushed by times when the league turned itself into a football carnival.
