Straight out of left field | Drafting a new medium for football fans

This year, ESPN and the NFL made a big to-do about moving the draft to primetime, making each round somehow more important simply because it was on TV at a different time. I have to say, this was one of the first years that I truly followed the draft and was deeply interested in it.

You know what the best part was? I didn't watch a minute of the coverage.

That's right, at not one point this past weekend was my television tuned to ESPN, ESPN 2, or the NFL Network for the sake of watching teams select their players of the future.

Thanks to the Worldwide Leader in Sports' complex and seemingly omniscient website, I got all of my draft coverage done without Chris Berman's name puns, the rowdy fans who took an opportunity to don the old jersey and get inebriated, or the unnatural formation of organic and chemical elements that is known as Mel Kiper's hair. 

Thanks to some strategic planning of my ESPN profile and some background knowledge, I found every bit of information I needed to evaluate not only how the Eagles did, but how everyone else in the league did as well.

The first thing I did was make an ESPN profile. This is free and relatively easy to do. The best part about it is that you choose specific teams that you follow so that as soon as you log on to ESPN.com, the scores you are interested pop up in the scoreboard on the top of the page. Thanks to this feature, I was able to immediately see who the Eagles had picked in the first round without delving through pages of information.

The second thing I found out was that if you simply click on the player's name, his entire breakdown appeared on screen: his attributes, skills, how they compare to other players, how they compare specifically to other players at the same position, etc. ESPN had taken all of the research out of the draft for the average Joe.

On top of this, every bit of analysis was posted within minutes of the pick. I could read "expert" opinions on a pick within 15 minutes. When I went over to NFL.com, I saw the same thing. I had the commentary of analysts Mel Kiper, Todd McShay, and Mike Mayock at my fingertips by simply going to two websites. This was just about the best draft experience I ever had.

This got me thinking: why would ESPN and the NFL do this?

The whole point of moving the draft back to primetime was so that the draft would come off as more important. Primetime means drama and entertainment, so the draft would come off as more attractive to the casual sports fan. It's pretty obvious that the networks want better ratings and publicity for the draft.

The only problem, however, is that the ESPN and NFL websites are counterintuitive to this attempt at more publicity. I'm no sports genius when it comes to scouting college football players. When I went looking for information as simple as where Taylor Mays was ranked in terms of other safeties, I got a full breakdown of his skill sets. I didn't need the television coverage; I could tell by simple reasoning if the pick a team made was the right choice. It was as if I had reached a sports Nirvana: not only could I watch the Phillies, I could track the NFL draft with ease at the same time, without having two television sets in the same room.

This leads me to my main question: shouldn't I want, if not need, to have my TV set to ESPN and not the Phillies? Wouldn't ESPN and the NFL want my focus to be on the draft?
The obvious answer is yes. For years ESPN has built up its brand as "The Worldwide Leader in Sports." They have established themselves as the go-to source of information within the sports world. They make people want to watch their coverage through their personalities like Stuart Scott, Mel Kiper, and Chris Berman.

But by providing viewers with so much information outside of the television coverage, they have severely undercut the importance of their television coverage. If more people like myself figure out that we don't need the television personalities to tell us why a pick is important, then the NFL draft may find that it has reverted to the old days when general managers would simply phone their picks in from the comfort of their own front offices.

Tom Hagan is the sports editor for The Hawk and junior Latin major.  Straight Out of Left Field appears weekly. He can be reached at: thehawk@sju.edu.