It's Getting Drafty

It used to be no one much paid attention to the NFL Draft. Now, for fans of football, the draft is nearly as important as a real season game.

I didn't bother to watch the draft, because that level of commitment is far more than I care to expend. I'll watch the star players, thank you. Or maybe just keep track of the players from the home team.

The funny thing about drafts is that it is the ultimate in not being satisfied with what you have. Throughout a season, someone will point out a deficiency in a team. A weak offensive line, a poor run defense, that kind of thing. And time and again, NFL teams choose to draft more of the same.

That wide receiver that we drafted so highly last year? Not good enough. Let's draft another. Maybe two or three more.

Lest this complaint be lodged at the NFL, the NBA draft seems to follow the same trend. Almost everyone repeats the mantra "pick the best player available", as if there were some absolute in how to pick the best player available.

On the rare lottery that the Washington Wizards picked first, who did Michael Jordan pick? The trend was high school players, and Kwame Brown, with the physical stature of the prototypical NBA player, fit the bill. He even promised "If you draft me, I won't disappoint you", only to be partly true about this promise, as he disappointed not just the Wizards, but the Lakers too. Thinking he had picked a guy with the same intensity and focus as him, Jordan discovered that Brown didn't respond to the verbal lashings like he would have. He saw too much of himself in Brown, and when that, predictably, failed to materialize, it made him lash out even more.

You might wonder how well a team would do if they let the fans pick their players for them. At the very least, they might draft what they actually need, but then fans are notoriously underinformed, except for the very few whose opinions would be washed out by the masses.

Draft season is great for columnists who universally pan the picks the local team has made, except for maybe a top 5 pick.

If there's any lesson from the draft, it's that the people who select rarely pick on what is needed, but what is desired, and that no one knows how to pick the next superstar.

Despite that, the team cognoscenti are content to keep on trying to read tea leaves and find that special missing ingredient.