COMMENTARY

Draft becoming too big for own good

If it continues its growth rate, the NFL Draft will someday encompass an entire month and will be held in a nation owned by itself.

It will command its own network and require its own password. Eventually its own weather system can water the world.

You might think Thursday night was the culmination of all these months of combine workouts, Pro Days, interviews, private workouts, franchise visits and exhibition games.

No. It was only the beginning of the culmination, because Thursday night was only the first round. Thanks to television, the draft takes up three days, which gives its homegrown intelligentsia time to squeeze behind the desk.

It was not always thus.

The draft was not televised at all until 1980. It began on a weekday morning, headquartered in a New York hotel conference room, and it consumed 30 rounds, at which point coffee-and-doughnut overload could lead to mischief.

“One year Atlanta announced it was taking Duke Wayne from Apache State in the 17th round,” Ron Wolf said.

Wolf was the top scout for the Oakland Raiders for 25 years. He was hired as general manager of the Green Bay Packers in 1991 and traded his very first draft pick for Atlanta’s backup quarterback, who had been a second-rounder. Hint: Wrangler commercials.

Wolf remembers a time when NFL teams took their college players through recommendations, word of mouth and the most rudimentary scouting reports. For one thing, drafts were held in late November or December. The NFL team was still playing, so the scouting groundwork was done during spring football.

There were no shuttle runs, no Wonderlic testing, no cross-referencing.

How primitive.

“Check out the 1952 draft,” Wolf said.

The second, third, ninth, 11th and 14th picks were Les Richter, Ollie Matson, Hugh McElhenny, Frank Gifford and Gino Marchetti, Hall of Famers all. So was Yale Lary, the 34th pick.

“I don’t think they do quite that well today,” Wolf said.

Sometimes they do. The 2004 draft, for example, might be well-represented in Canton, Ohio, with Eli Manning, Larry Fitzgerald, Philip Rivers, Ben Roethlisberger, Vince Wilfork, Steven Jackson and Jared Allen.

But the point is that the draft has probably become the No. 1 example of sports bloat. Proportionality is gone. It just doesn’t televise well.

“When the draft was earlier, you went to spring practice and you got to see some hitting,” Wolf said.“Now, you mainly see guys playing in shorts.

“You get a lot more information but sometimes that works against you today. In Oakland we took Ken Stabler in the second round and he was a great quarterback. We didn’t know everything about him. With more time to research him, he might not have gone very high at all [for off-the-field behavior].”

The lag time means that the actual college football season becomes less and less important, because so many other things happen in between.

There’s the Senior Bowl, the combine and each college’s Pro Day, in which a player who already has had every capillary analyzed has to please yet another assemblage.

That, says former New Orleans Saints and Kansas City Chiefs General Manager Bill Kuharich, is where trouble awaits.

For years, coaches worried about formations and plays, and general managers and scouts worried about the draft.

“But then Bill Parcells started talking about needing to shop for the groceries if he was going to cook the dinner,” Kuharich said. “And coaches, who were getting paid more than general managers, started getting involved.

“Teams like Pittsburgh, Baltimore and Green Bay have been able to maintain winning because the evaluators are in charge of the evaluation and the coaches aren’t.”

In New Orleans, Jim Mora campaigned for Washington offensive tackle Lincoln Kennedy in 1993. Don James, for whom Mora once worked, had recommended him.

The scouts pushed for Louisiana Tech’s Willie Roaf (Pine Bluff), primarily because Roaf had pushed around Alabama’s Eric Curry and John Copeland during the season.

When the draft came down, Copeland went fifth and Curry sixth. The Saints, at eight, took Roaf, and the Falcons took Kennedy at nine. Roaf is the only Hall of Famer from that first round.

“And we were on the defensive from the beginning,” Kuharich said. “Why did you take a guy from a smaller school? That’s what happens. Everybody has all this information, all these opinions. You just try to ignore as much of the noise as you can.”

Sometimes, silence is deafening.

Two years ago, San Francisco 49ers Coach Jim Harbaugh observed Nevada’s Colin Kaepernick, the option quarterback. He watched intently, thanked Kaepernick and said nothing else. To anybody.

“The next time we heard from San Francisco was when they drafted him,” said Chris Ault, Nevada’s coach at the time.

Kaepernick came within a completion of winning the Super Bowl. You know, the game that leads up to the NFL Draft.

Sports, Pages 18 on 04/26/2013

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