NFL Draft 2018

[BSink42]

Who's watching this year's Draft?

[DJlurker]

Not me, don’t care.

[MadMax359]

i'd rather watch paint dry
wake up the next morning and see what happened, without hours of contrived drama

[Fred588]

Nope. No interest whatsoever. Of course, I have no interest in the games either. To me, professional sports (and football in particular) represent all (ok, much) that is wrong in our culture. Its all about winning and the bottom line. In my teaching career I saw too many examples of the damage done to athletes, mostly in football, basketball, and baseball, o have much respect for those coaching and running the teams.

Here are some examples of what I have seen, all of them true stories:

1. An 11 year old kid trying to play baseball in a little league farm team (a farm team being a team for kids with no talent), who for more than a year had left practice a few minutes early one evening per week to attend a Scout meeting, being suddenly given an ultimatum by the coach that he could not have both. "You have to decide right now...Its baseball or Scouts." That 11 year old was me.

2. A newly-hired college football coach going to faculty members to ask, "Give me any advise you can that will help my team," to which one faculty member replied, "Look for recruits who can read.... no recruit is going to help you much as a freshman or sophomore and if he cannot read he is never going to be a junior or senior." That advise was ignored, of course. The faculty member was me.

3. A scholarship basketball player scores about a 20 on each of two mid-terms, when the class average otherwise is about 78, leaving one hundred percent of the fill-in questions completely blank. He then comes to the teacher with a sob story about how he will be suspended from the team if he fails the class. The teacher was me. This was a student who obviously could not even read the questions on the exam, never mind answer them in writing. Who recruited him?

Rant over.

[Duncan Edwards]

After last season's "I Hate America" follies I tuned out the NFL for a while. That definitely damaged my passion for the game. Figured I might even give it up but the draft is on the NFL channel right now. Season tickets are purchased yet again for the 20th year. Tentative plans are being made to follow our team to London this fall. Twitter has become a useful tool to keep up with things. I have many distractions at the moment with kids, elderly parents, work, etc but one major distraction is having a team in the NHL Stanley Cup playoffs again so football takes a back seat to hockey for a while. Shows you where my priorities are.

Many guys have a problem with their wife complaining that such things get in the way. My wife, and one reason she is my wife, is a bigger sports fan than I am. She's all over it so it's something we enjoy together and that has huge value in this day and age.