Calling off the blitz worked for NFL Draft

By the time the telecast of the first round of the NFL Draft was about to wind down last week, commissioner Roger Goodell had commenced revealing the selections while lounging in an easy chair.

That’s when the TV host, Trey Wingo, said the two most important words in modern pro-football history. “Relax, Rog,” he said. Exactly.

Relax.

Though the homier draft coverage this year was born from health concerns and not a TV producer’s vision, it returned some necessary perspective to what had become an event that was more of an imposition than a treat.

Originally scheduled to unfold in Las Vegas, the show this year was re-formatted to provide a service, not a spectacle.

Instead of being coaxed to parade onto some over-lit stage in a fashion show, the higher picks were televised in their homes, usually with their families, showing genuine joy.

Instead of the director cutting every 11 seconds to a fan wearing six-dozen strands of team-colored beads, more coverage was concentrated on the selectors making the picks, with cameras stationed in their home offices.

And even if Goodell did try to encourage some cyber-booing of himself, if only to maintain a warped tradition, even that fell flat. Good. Enough of that anyway.

Next year, the draft will turn public again, planted outside the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in Cleveland. The stomach turns at the potential for over-mixing entertainers and football players. But for one year, there was the commissioner in his basement, the general managers at their computers, the players at home with their families and the fans, as they should be, mostly muffled.

Different? Yes. But it worked.

So relax.

••• Donovan McNabb never did forgive Eagles fans for being booed at the draft. And, yes, he was smart enough to know that the act was a manufactured morning-radio stunt. He just used it as an excuse to be indifferent to a city that generally tried to make him feel welcome.

This year, when the Eagles drafted Jalen Hurts in the second round, no one had been provided complimentary bus travel to the scene for organized heckling. Yet Eagles fans did everything possible to make him feel less liked than Sidney Crosby. For hours, for days, for a week, often from talk-show hosts but also from the usual anonymous social-media germs, Hurts was roundly rejected for one major reason: His mere presence could be disruptive to the ever-developing career of Carson Wentz.

Who knows how Hurts eventually will connect with the sports fans of Philadelphia? He has been pre-screened and approved as a “good teammate.” So there’s that. But if any quarterback has the right to be offended at how his draft selection was treated by too many miserable people determined to find comfort in a group, it’s the one who has been blasted for a week and counting, not the one who was jeered for 10 televised seconds. ••• Not a single Greek myth have I ever gotten. And that’s right, Hercules, I am looking at you and flashing the twofingers-to-the-eyes signal. ••• While the NFL had the marketing sense to grasp the value of taking a customarily public event and reducing its draft for one-year to a TV special, baseball let a similar opportunity roll foul. With a chance to maximize the interest in the induction ceremony this summer, baseball could not convince the Hall of Fame to change it rather than postpone the usual ceremony one year amid health concerns. Seems the Hall of Fame didn’t want mobs of fans descending at once upon Cooperstown this July. And never mind, either, that the ceremony is not at the Hall of Fame itself but at a sprawling open space on the edge of town where social distancing easily could have been enforced. That the ceremony typically unfolds on a summer Sunday literally while every majorleague team is playing is its own scheduling mystery. But with a onetime chance to move the inductions of Derek Jeter, Larry Walker, Ted Simmons and Marvin Miller to an off-night and into a studio, baseball could have owned several hours of prime TV time for an affair that too many typically miss anyway. Instead, the fans were just shooed away. Baseball is the best at that. • Sports fans missed the Kentucky Derby Saturday, which this year has a Sept. 5 post time. But just to make it feel like it usually does on the first Saturday in May, I drove past the race track and threw a $50 bill out the window. ••• Celebrities playing on game shows? Pass the clicker. ••• Whether organically or by the commissioner’s order, stadiums may be half empty when baseball returns. With that, there should be one positive result: Those controlfreak seat police, otherwise known as ushers, must be ordered to stand down. No matter how much it would threaten their flimsy authority, they will have to allow a typical family of four to spread out over six seats if a few are unoccupied. And it can no longer be treated like breaking and entering if a customer finds it healthier to sit peacefully in a lower-deck section with 29 empty rows than to be herded into a heavily peopled fair-territory outpost. Even if such simple decency was six decades to slow too develop, it will prove that all tyrants eventually will be overthrown. ••• I don’t care how much stay-at-home orders cause binge-watching options to evaporate, no one will be so starved for entertainment to be reduced to watching a wedding video.