Kiper...

Kiper is one lucky guy, to be sure. This draft thing just kind of happened. I can remember doing some of the same stuff around 1980 and '81, reading Joel Buschsbaum's analysis voraciously, and, in those days, listening to the sports reports on the news radio stations every half hour on draft day to pick up the latest selections. Maybe I should have gone in the draft direction instead of the TGS direction, who knows, perhaps I could have been the next Kiper. I even did my own makeshift draft previews and reviews back then. The draft was a peripheral industry unto itself for a good many years, but it really started to mainstream when ESPN began growing by leaps and bounds in the '80s. Kiper, as they say, was just a guy in the right place at the right time, and like Dick Vitale is one of the ESPN-created monsters.

Regarding the draft, never has so much been said about so little!

Having said that, Kiper doesn't bug me too much. I haven't talked to him in a few years, but he always seemed a pretty nice guy to me, is an avid Gold Sheet reader, and in fact a pretty well-informed overall sports buff. On occasion I have heard him on ESPN radio doing a general sports show, and he comes across better than the majority of hosts, and knows a bit about other sports, too.

But I agree, the draft stuff grates, though I am more turned off these days by Chris Berman's caricature of himself (it was cool in the day to first hear Facenda utter the words "frozen tundra," and to hear his voice accompany the Raider theme song, but when Berman keeps repeating them, and other once-clever bits, ad nauseum, they lose their desired effect...and then some), Joe Theismann's smugness, and the whole attitude of the holier-than-thou NFL. The draft is an overkill extension of all of that, but in itself is merely the culmination of an entire draft "industry" that has spawned. I hardly watch the NFL Network, but sat in horror for a few minutes a while back when they were providing "live" coverage of the Indianapolis scouting combine. The entire NFL product, including the games themselves, is so over-hyped and overdone that it sickens me, and I was as captivated as anyone by the NFL for a long, long time. But no more.

I can take the likes of Chris Mortensen and John Clayton when football season is going on, but when it's baseball time, I would rather not see those guys. And if I hear one more word about Brett Favre returning to the Packers, I might become physically ill. Isn't there something better to talk about? I've never seen a player so past his sell-by date still captivate the media in such a way. The Packers stink, Favre is over the hill, and Lombardi has been gone for almost 40 years. But you'd never know any of it from ESPN and the NFL...

P.S.--By the way, and I haven't spent too much time thinking about that infuritating Steelers-Seahawks Super Bowl the past few months, but in regard to all-time SB rankings I am now more apt to rate that game closer to the bottom quartile, if not somewhere in it. In retrospect, were it not the Super Bowl, it would have been about as dull as a regular season, Lions-Cardinals matchup, and it gets worse from there when adding in the pitiful officiating...