The Draw Play

Sometimes I wonder if I should have pivoted early on and focused on being a Fantasy Guy or a Draft Guy instead of my current “artist guy”. Seems like those other guys make a lot of money and can have good careers doing something that seems fun and apparently has very little pressure because nothing they talk about actually matters whatsoever and they don’t have to be right about anything. I don’t wonder about it for very long, because I find fantasy football exhausting and I also could not give less of a fuck about college football so my draft study won’t be any good. But I don’t know if being good at it is a pre-requisite for the job. I might take the list of all potential 1st rounders and just give them arbitrary grades on how good I expect them to be in the NFL, based purely on something like their facial hair. I wonder what my hit rate would be compared to someone who does this for a living. Comment if you want to see me try this before the draft later this month.

Draft analysis bothers me so much because it all ultimately is just noise. Analysts make sure fire lock predictions every year and every year they get them wrong. They get tons of attention every time they release new thoughts or mock drafts because fans just want to argue and disagree with each other and these draft guys give them an outlet. Justin Fields is dropping? Why? Because one guy said a source mentioned it! Now he’s falling across the boards based on some rumor that was probably a smokescreen in the first place and then we get 3 days of content based around the question of why Justin Fields stock is dropping and oh my god people are making more money than me to just go on ESPN and start shit via shit they pulled out of their ass. When these folks make predictions and calls, does it matter if they get the picks right? Not really. Mel Kiper bet his job once on Jimmy Clausen being a NFL star. He’s still employed and doing just fine. When you get the predictions wrong you can just be like “whelp!” or deflect it saying “well he went into a bad situation that got worse” or something equally technically correct and be fine. The most repercussions these folks get is people bringing up their biggest whiffs for years, but this is the internet. People will bring up literally anything you ever did wrong ever for years and hate you for the dumbest reasons possible, so you can just tune out the noise.

You do have to be at least somewhat accurate to be a respected draft guy, but I’m not sure if the average joe like myself couldn’t pretty much get just as close through half-assed guessing. I have no real expertise in picking games and this past season I got over 60% of my picks right, more or less in line with the pros. With a couple days of study I think I, and anyone reading this, could probably get reasonably close to the people with fat media contracts doing it on TV. I think one of the reasons we can’t really hold any draft analyst accountable for being bad at predicting is that you can’t judge a pick for a few years, and by then everyone has moved on.

So maybe we should make it a game later this month. We should do a Draw Play 1 round mock draft, where I will make all my picks, you can make yours, and after the draft we can compare our success rate to any of the schmoes who get paid for it and see how we did. After the draft, maybe we can do a grade, where we randomly predict success, average, or bust for players and in 3 years I can come back and laugh at us. If this sounds fun, SMASH THAT LIKE BUTTON AND TELL ME IN THE COMMENTS. If this sounds stupid and you hate me, do the same, whatever I don’t care.