Nystrom also told me about a player who was not the draft’s most promising prospect but was among its most intriguing: Tyren Montgomery, a wide receiver from John Carroll University, a Division III school that hadn’t had a player drafted in thirty-five years. (That player was the 1991 draft’s final selection, a distinction affectionately known as Mr. Irrelevant.) Nystrom researches the draft tirelessly, keeping a spreadsheet of data (ages, game stats, hand widths) on nearly two thousand players, and publicly ranks his top five hundred—nearly twice as many as will actually be drafted. But in January, when he attended the Senior Bowl, an all-star showcase of draft prospects, Montgomery was unfamiliar to him. “I know everyone,” Nystrom told me. “I’d never fuckin’ heard of this guy.”
Nystrom, who has an M.F.A. in nonfiction from the University of Iowa, was struck by Montgomery’s trajectory: he had only begun playing football in college, but at the showcase he had stood out against surefire early-round defenders. He now had a chance to be picked in the draft’s later rounds, where draftees typically have to fight to make the team but occasionally become starters or even stars. “You have this wide band of outcomes,” Nystrom said. “He’s new to the sport, comes from D-III, but we just saw him lick a bunch of top-hundred prospects.” Such is the draft’s central allure: a player might amount to nothing. But he could also become anything.
For a league that is run by some of America’s most fervent capitalists, the N.F.L. has an odd relationship with free markets. These days, teams’ payrolls are capped and the league’s revenue is shared. The goal is to create competitive parity, or at least the appearance of it—to sell the idea that on any given Sunday any team can win. The draft was the league’s first step in this direction. In 1935, the owner of the then sad-sack Philadelphia Eagles grew tired of better teams scooping up all the best players, and proposed the draft as a remedy. For some reason, the better teams agreed. It began the next year as a simple affair, with coaches smoking cigars in a hotel room and scrawling names on a chalkboard. This year, Mendoza was in line for a four-year contract worth nearly sixty million dollars, whereas, in 1936, the No. 1 pick, Jay Berwanger, a running back from the University of Chicago, turned down a contract for a thousand dollars a game and never played professionally. Instead, he went into rubber and plastics.
In 1980, when ESPN was not yet a year old and was desperate to partner with major leagues, the network proposed to Pete Rozelle, then the N.F.L.’s commissioner, that it televise the draft. “Pete started laughing his ass off,” Steve Bornstein, a former ESPN president, recalled. As the longtime Sports Illustrated writer Peter King told me, Rozelle “thought it would be embarrassing, because nothing effing happens.” But Rozelle agreed, and ESPN set out to make an event of it. “The higher-ups said, ‘If this thing is not working, make a graceful exit and get off the air,’ ” Bob Ley, who anchored ten drafts for ESPN, told me, of that first TV draft. It aired on a Tuesday morning, and mostly consisted of guys placidly chatting at a desk. The action shots were of men making unheard phone calls in the New York Sheraton ballroom. “It’s like the difference between Edison’s first kinetoscope and the latest movie at the Cineplex,” Ley said, comparing the draft then versus now. “Technically they’re part of the same family of entertainment, but just barely.”
That year, ESPN aired eight hours of draft coverage (amazingly, only the first third of the draft’s selections), a number it gradually increased until it began televising every pick, over the course of two days, in the mid-nineties. It had discovered what now feels obvious: at the nadir of the football calendar—three months after the Super Bowl, three months before preseason games—fans hunger for even the idea of the sport. “Sports fans have an amazing ability to seem to care more about the future than the present,” Daniel Wann, a psychology professor at Murray State who focusses on sports fandom, told me. “They live in a world of unknown.” Uncertainty and anticipation are central to dopamine release: the countdown to vacation, the planning of a perfect party, the thrill of the chase. It’s fun to watch your team win. It can be just as fun to hope they will, and to imagine how. “It’s theatre of the mind,” Nystrom told me. A colleague of mine once likened it to football fan fiction.
The most transformative change to ESPN’s coverage came in 1984, with the addition of Kiper, the ur-draftnik. A few years earlier, he had quit community college to compile and sell draft guidebooks out of his parents’ Maryland basement. He was sharp and sharp-looking, with a vaguely avian face beneath a dark pompadour, and was doggedly dedicated—year-round—to a subject with which few in the media even engaged. When a team drafted some linebacker from Appalachian State in the fifth round, Kiper could offer a torrent of assessment. “Before we had the flashy graphics and pre-produced research packages, we had Mel,” Ley said. Writers have likened his Baltimore-tinged, auctioneer-like patter to “a breathless cross between machine gun and Morse code,” and have described him as having the “mind of a savant beneath the immovable coiffure of a lounge act.” Chris Berman, one of ESPN’s earliest anchors, told me, of Kiper, “I didn’t know anybody like this existed.”
