The NFL Draft is currently on TV. I'm currently not watching it, which I'm sure doesn't surprise any of you. I don't watch college football, and I'm not sure how you can take something that should take two hours and extend it into three days worth of television. Seriously, how much analysis of each pick do you need (both before and after its made)? And why do you need 15 minutes in the first round?! The Panthers have known they have the No. 1 pick since January! They should know who they want by now. (In 2002, the Texans used their entire time to draft David Carr, who they'd already signed!)
Anyway, my rant about the NFL Draft is just part of a larger point. The draft is designed to help teams get better by selecting a player that they hope will fill a certain need. Usually, they know what those needs are. But that's not the case this season. Because of the lockout, free agency, which usually starts in the beginning of March, has yet to begin, and teams aren't allowed to make trades either. Normally you'll also use trades and free agency to improve your team, leaving a couple holes left to fill in the draft.
But my favorite part about this year's NFL Draft is that they proudly have "more prospects than ever before" attending. Why? These guys are going to get drafted by a team, but won't be allowed to sign or do anything. So what exactly is the point then? Because it was already scheduled and the NFL wants to keep acting as if everything is functioning as normal?
Let me see if I've got all this straight...the owners lock out the players, the players go to court for the right to play, are given that right back by a judge, then start going back to team facilities, where they aren't allowed to do anything. And the owners want us to believe that this is all somehow the players' fault?
Mr. Brilliant Commissioner summed up the potential "dangerous ramifications" of the players winning the labor battle in an opinion piece that ran in the Wall Street Journal on Monday. Ignoring the sheer idiocy of arguing your case in a newspaper that 95 percent of sports fans don't read (unless they're also checking their stock quotes), everything he wrote completely contradicts everything that the owners claim to want. He paints a doomsday scenario that is completely far-fetched and utterly ridiculous. I especially love the bullet points. Yes, all that stuff is clearly going to happen.
Our boy Roger (or, should I say, the owners' boy) has rightfully been trashed by just about everyone for his contribution to American journalism. And all of those criticisms are correct about a couple key points. For starters, he says "there has been a work stoppage as the league has sought to negotiate a new collective bargaining agreement with the players." Evidently even the NFL owners don't know the difference between a strike and a lockout. The reason there's a work stoppage is because the owners aren't letting the players come to work! He also cries about the lockout being lifted and saying it "may endanger the NFL." No, I'm pretty sure playing football will NOT endanger the future of the National Football League. Not playing for an entire season worked for the NHL, which had a broken system that needed fixing. Hey Rog, if it ain't broke don't fix it. It's broke now, though. Because the owners threw it on the floor and smashed it into a million pieces.
In a nutshell, Baddell argues that the pre-March status quo is the best thing for the league, even though the owners decided they didn't like that status quo, which is the reason why we even had a lockout in the first place. So, I'm still not sure I've got this...the old CBA didn't work for the owners when they signed it, when they opted out of it, or when they initiated the lockout, but now that they're completely getting their asses kicked by the players they think it's OK and want to go back to it? Am I the only person who's confused here?
The NFL owners are afraid of a free market system that seems to work pretty well for the rest of America. That's not even what the players want! And now that the owners aren't getting their way, it's somehow the players' fault that they didn't like the last deal, which is now suddenly the greatest thing since sliced bread? Maybe they don't understand what "hypocricy" means either.
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