NFL Draft Stirs Up The Stupidest Nonsense In All Of Sports
By Johnny Carey, CBS Boston
BOSTON (CBS) -- Ohio State cornerback Eli Apple is one of the most talented defensive back prospects in the 2016 NFL Draft. His NFL.com scouting report notes, "Scouts praise him for work ethic and technical improvement over last two years. Will come downhill against run and is diligent with contain responsibilities. Has optimal size/speed numbers for an early round cornerback."
There's only one problem. According to an anonymous draft scout, Eli Apple can't cook.
"The kid has no life skills. At all. Can't cook. Just a baby. He's not first round for me. He scares me to death," remarked the unnamed scout.
Interesting. However will a 20-year-old succeed playing football if he doesn't know how to cook? Apparently, you shouldn't pick a guy in the first round unless he can make the rounds with Guy Fieri and Bobby Flay on The Food Channel.
Apple quickly responded in kind, stating, "I can cook on the field."
But Eli, come on, it's the NFL Draft! Skills, talent and potential don't make for great headlines after months and months of coverage of something that's pretty much a crapshoot.
Forget talent. On the day Apple is set to make the biggest leap of his life, all the talk is about whether or not he paid attention in home ec.
Apple's pre-draft scrutiny is dumb, ridiculous, or however else you want to categorize it. One thing it isn't, though, is unusual.
Throughout the draft process, anonymous NFL scouts invent criticisms of college kids so outlandish that you can't help but cringe. They just love to produce controversy, because after all, publicity is what it's all about.
In 2010, the Jacksonville Jaguars made Austen Lane the team's fifth-round selection. He played five years in the NFL before retiring in 2014, however, he took to Twitter this February in order to let the world in on the pre-draft interview process.
Out of his many half-hilarious, half-sad tweets, these are two of the best:
Also in 2010, then-Dolphins GM Jeff Ireland allegedly asked Dez Bryant straight-up if his mother was a prostitute.
"They asked me if my mom's a prostitute," Bryant revealed to Michael Silver. "No, my mom is not a prostitute. I got mad – really mad – but I didn't show it. I got a lot of questions like that."
Ireland apologized, sort of.
"My job is to find out as much information as possible about a player that I'm considering drafting. Sometimes that leads to asking in-depth questions," Ireland said. "Having said that, I talked to Dez Bryant and told him I used poor judgment in one of the questions I asked him. I certainly meant no disrespect and apologized to him."
Those are interesting ways to approach an interview, NFL. While the particular questions were asked six years ago, Lane and Bryant's experiences are still a very common part of the NFL Draft process.
Just this year, the Atlanta Falcons came under fire for asking, (guess who?) Eli Apple, if he liked men in their pre-draft interview.
"The Falcons coach, one of the coaches, was like, 'So do you like men?'" Apple told Comcast SportsNet. "It was like the first thing he asked me. It was weird. I was just like, 'No.' He was like, 'If you're going to come to Atlanta, sometimes that's how it is around here. You're going to have to get used to it.'"
That question was particularly inappropriate, but it goes to show just how far teams are willing to pry during the draft process. Players like Apple (especially Apple, it seems), are treated like test subjects for NFL teams to experiment on.
The teams themselves, though, only constitute part of the absurdity. Turn on your television today and you'll undoubtedly see an "expert" naming who every team is going to pick. Check again later tonight, and they'll most likely have been horribly wrong.
How great would it be to become a draft "expert?" I love watching highlight tapes on YouTube and deciding for myself who's going to be the next big thing at every position as much as the next person. I'm very rarely right, but then again, considering no one really knows what's going to come from each draft, what's wrong with that? In 2016, how off are our projections from those from the people you see on TV?
We can all come up with the "expert" buzzwords and catchphrases.
"He's got the size, he can make all the throws. Smart guy who excelled in a pro-style offense."
"He's got explosive speed and really aced the combine. Tremendous upside."
Make a list of those phrases and put an over/under on how many times they'll be uttered over the weekend - it'll be a high number.
Seahawks star corner Richard Sherman is among the most outspoken against all of the pre-draft stupidity created by the major television networks.
"It's more funny than it is frustrating. I don't really care. I think of it as them talking to a bunch of sheep who will believe anything anyway. So I just laugh. Because [the analysts] have no idea," Sherman said. "Every year they sit here and make all these predictions about who's going to get drafted and where and how they have all this inside information, and then when the guys don't get drafted there, and what they predicted doesn't happen, there's no ridicule. There's no criticism."
Sherman's completely correct. Every year, the draft becomes more and more of a spectacle, as the once relatively low-key event is now spaced out over three nights/days in order to be shown on prime time. It doesn't really matter who's picked where right away, because no one knows how good any of these players are going to be - it just has to be a great show.
In hindsight, those "expert" predictions often don't look so good.
Just for fun here are some of the best burning hot-takes of recent years surrounding the NFL Draft: (Check out @oldtakesexposed for many more from every sport)
If only Twitter was around sooner.
The moral of the story is that the NFL Draft is a bizarre spectacle. It's unpredictable, and it's the peak of league-driven hype designed to keep your interest squarely on the NFL all 365 days of the year.
The most insane part of it all, though, is that I'm still excited to watch.
Johnny Carey is a senior at Boston College. You can find him on Twitter@JohnnyCarey94
