The Draw Play

For 20 years, Eli has been notoriously tight-lipped regarding the San Diego Chargers draft debacle. We knew he didn’t want to play there, we knew he tried to make the Chargers pass on him, we knew Archie defended him, and we ultimately know the result. There are multiple theories, but the most commonly accepted one is that Archie used his clout to strong-arm Eli out of San Diego.

But this past week Eli went on Bussin’ with the Boys and dropped a bunch of new lore. The biggest bombshell: it was indeed all Eli’s choice. Archie wasn’t actually fond of trying to force his way out of San Diego but he went and publicly supported his son, taking all the heat. What a good dad.

The other big piece of lore Eli drops is revealing why he got skittish of San Diego. He liked Marty Schottenheimer, but the team management was not putting on a good face for him. They argued, they fought, they took him to dinner in a chain hotel when they lived in the best food city in the country. All sorts of red flags of an unserious organization. He was one of very few players to ever publicly pull the stunt of rejecting the draft, and it is a black mark on his resume for most football fans. Even as an Eli simp, it’s been hard to ignore the sour taste that was required for my favorite team to land him. But maturing and learning about the world does change perspective.

We have a tendency as the public to see pro athletes as these privileged babies, getting paid more money than most of us will ever see to play a game. Make no mistake: they still are.

But they are also something we forget to see too often: labor. They are employees. Being a professional athlete is a job. The older I get, the less I think Eli did the wrong thing, and I start to think most incoming rookies who have the ability to should honestly pull the same shit. From a labor perspective, the draft itself is fucked up. Would you want to graduate from college with a degree and then just be forced to work for whatever company just magically selects the rights to your services? You don’t get to choose what company, they choose you, and the worst companies get first dibs. The rest of the employment market doesn’t work like this for good reasons; it’s nonsense. But it’s the norm in sports.

Its obviously more complicated than that, players aren’t forced to work for the team they are drafted to, they could pull a Bo Jackson and sit out a year, stuff like that, but it’s still not how the rest of the employment world operates, and Bo is another extreme rarity.

The Draft also allows certain organizations and owners to get away with not caring. If the team’s success requires you to put forth effort to make the team worth signing to, the bad/cheap owners will fail much harder than getting to pick the next top players by default. The current system allows teams like the Cardinals to put in minimal efforts and get rewarded.

We don’t question this much because the draft is good for parity and more importantly: this is just how it’s always been. We judge athletes for holding out for better contracts of millions but don’t level the same degree of criticism at the people with billions in power controlling everything. The people who set up the system to be as fucked as it is. They’ve done a great job of it.

When a player does something like hold out or demand a trade we call them entitled. We get mad when they try to strike. We justify it by stating that they get millions to play a game. That they get no say in where they are drafted is just a drawback to the sweet deal they get. Eli was a villain to many people for doing what seems positively reasonable in a different light. He saw a company with a bunch of major red flags and said “no”. Because he was Peyton’s brother and Archie’s kid, he was able to pull it off, and even then it was only because San Diego decided they wanted to trade him in the first place. Most players will not have that pull. Most players will not have the ability to justify sacrificing a top pick contract deal so they can go where they prefer. Funnily enough, you do see this in the lower end of the draft. Many fringe talents prefer to go undrafted as it allows them to sign wherever they please as UDFAs.

Eli’s move has been treated less harshly as time goes on, even Chargers fans more or less admit that he wasn’t wrong about the state of the team; it was just rude that he acted on it. The trade was a win for both franchises. The Giants got a hero out of it, and the Chargers were able to build a contender that dragged them out of the gutter for the same period of time. It softened the blow. But we haven’t seen a player do it since, and I think the massive negative stigma that came with it is why. It was 20 years before that when Elway did it. It’s barely been over 20 since. We might be due for the next top pick pulling the Escape hatch.

Now that college players can actually make money and not be quite as forced to take whatever the draft deals give them…maybe? I wonder if a lot of top players will make the decision to stay in college longer now, and we find out later the reason was because they didn’t like the way the Jets were staring at them from across the bar.