How much is too much?
With the NFL it seems like that is always the question. How many more games do they need to play in London? How many Thursday night NFL Network games do there have to be? How many more playoff teams should be added?
This season, it was the draft, an already completely overblown spectacle, that got the NFL’s hype-machine enhancement treatment. It’s May 9 and we’re only a day into this thing. May 9! Stay tuned football fans, there’s plenty more “coverage” to come.
Gone are my days of tuning in to the draft from start to finish, especially with it airing on Thursday night right in the middle of an exciting Orioles game. Last night, I monitored twitter and flipped over when I saw the Ravens were on the clock. Then I watched as Jason La Canfora spoiled that Ozzie Newsome had drafted C.J. Mosley and I quickly flipped back over to baseball.
From a production standpoint, the NFL draft is an absolute disaster. It’s not the broadcasters’ fault, as there’s only so much preparation that can be done with his event. But as a viewer, watching the NFL draft seems like I’m looking at a five-hour event with about 35 minutes of actual content. That’s part of the reason why I can’t tune in anymore. It’s just so sloppily done.
The gaps between picks aren’t filled with much insightful information; rather they seem to be predicting what’s going to happen next. Didn’t we just spend the last three months doing that?
A perfect example of this was the Johnny Manziel-watch that was ongoing last night. Too much time was spent wondering where “Johnny Football” would eventually end up rather than giving the viewers statistics or breakdowns of the players that were actually being selected.
This chart of the number of times each player drafted last night was mentioned on ESPN, via Deadspin, gives a nice visualization of their obsession:
Ridiculous.
With our brave new world of changing media, why should a fan like me even bother dedicating the hours to watching the draft? With Twitter, I got exactly what I wanted last night without having to look at Mel Kiper’s hair or listen to Chris Berman do his Chris Berman impression. I received the news I wanted as it happened, watched only what I wanted to watch and got out of there before I completely lost my sanity.
The draft shows don’t give nearly as much analysis as the analysts, personalities and websites that I follow on Twitter. So, unless you’re a huge NFL fan who’s dying to stay up to the second with the “action,” why would you tune in if your favorite team isn’t on the clock?
I should point out that while all of this was going on last night, my tweetdeck feed was going absolutely insane. I’ve never seen tweets roll in so fast. No wonder the NFL continues to throw more, more, more at us. We keep eating it up. Until we stop watching the draft, stop tuning in on Thursday nights and stop caring about football 365 days a year, the NFL will continue to feed us more.
Maybe that’s secretly what we all want anyway.
