MIKE BURKE

Allegany Communications Sports

It’s Mel Kiper Jr. time, I see; and I like Mel, but I don’t watch ESPN unless there is a game on of some sort, but it’s always on in the public house I visit on occasion, thankfully with the sound turned down, and over the last three weeks I have deduced that it must be NFL Draft time.

Mel, a good Baltimore man, has been up there on the screen a lot lately, the other day doing a mock draft with something called Field Yates (an app, maybe?), which even included hypothetical trades masterminded by ESPN, which is another reason I don’t allow myself to get caught up in the pre-event silliness.

You think the Super Bowl is overhyped? ESPN’s been pushing this draft down our throats daily since the week after the Super Bowl, which was over two months ago.

Draft and NFL fantasy geeks no doubt are in Shangri-La. Breakdowns on everybody. Breakdowns on each team: needs, wants, draft-day strategy, real live looks into the Dallas Cowboys war room! Wow. It’s Utopia. A permanently happy land, isolated from the outside world with nobody but Mel and … I have no idea who else even does it anymore … to concentrate on.

And do you realize people actually hold NFL Draft Day parties at their homes, complete with chips, bean dip and draft boards to fill in as they go along? I’m not making this up. I actually attended a draft day party several years ago, and a bunch of guys got together with their charts, their magazines and their cell phones and just had one helluva good time.

Grown men sweating out whether the Minnesota Vikings would trade down in a three-team deal, which not only would prevent their favorite team from getting the offensive tackle from Missouri, but would completely screw up the draft boards they had meticulously charted based on the input they received on ESPN for the previous two months.

And football fans say baseball fans have no lives? Please.

The NFL Annual Player Selection Meeting, or the NFL draft for those not fully geeked out, is a three-day prime-time television event that cities fight over to host, with Green Bay winning this year.

It ain’t what the Academy Awards used to be, but that’s how ABC and ESPN will treat it, particularly on Thursday, the draft’s opening night, which is why I will probably watch it on the NFL Network.

There is likely nothing more boring to watch than football practice, but televised NFL and NBA drafts come close. There is at least a sense of an important business meeting feel to the NFL draft, but the NBA draft is just cheesy, though not as cheesy as the NBA lottery selection show.

Opening large numbered envelopes, pulling NBA team logos from them, then placing them on shelves to rank the order of selections while a panel of representatives from NBA teams sit behind two tiers of counters sweating it out as though they are Miss America finalists? That’s hard cheese. And just where does this take place, the set from Match Game ’74?

So while there is much to mock about the NFL draft (not to mention NFL mock drafts) – the inexactness of it all, the real-life cartoon characters who come into our dens and public houses to bring it to us, as well as the self-importance of it all – why do we absorb as much pre-draft hype as we do? Why do we still watch it?

We do because we are intrigued by inexactness, we love to be entertained by cartoons, and the NFL has every right to feel its thick air of self-importance, because sports fans the continent over have made NFL football this country’s national sporting obsession. Not pastime – obsession.

Not only that, the idea of a player draft takes us back to our most fundamental need to pick a team, be it fifth-grade softball, little league baseball or NFL football. If we’re on a team, or hold an interest for a team, we are intrigued to discover how we are going to improve our team, leaving us then to wonder what will be on the first day of the next season.

So while it seems rather silly to carry around so much interest in something nobody has the absolute correct answer for, the NFL draft is a made-for-television event, and many of us will watch it.

I’ll watch it. I always watch it. I like watching the NFL Draft – but only on the day of the draft, although the movie “Draft Day” is can’t-miss for me because it’s just so bad it’s good.

Most of all, though, I like watching what happens after the NFL Draft. Because isn’t that the most important part of this whole thing?

Mike Burke writes about sports and other stuff for Allegany Communications. He began covering sports for the Prince George’s Sentinel in 1981 and joined the Cumberland Times-News sports staff in 1984, serving as sports editor for over 30 years. Contact him at [email protected]. Follow him on X @MikeBurkeMDT