With a new look, live event to fill sports void
Social distancing reigns as NFL alters procedures for draft
Although selections will be announced from commissioner Roger Goodell’s basement rather than a glitzy stage in Las Vegas, the three-day NFL draft that begins Thursday night will be what it always has been: a fine mixture of hope and hype.
Both elements — the promotional and inspirational — were on display Wednesday as Goodell outlined his aspirations for the draft, which will be the first major event of this season without sports since the COVID-19 shutdown of mid-March.
“People look to us for optimism,” the commissioner said on ESPN’s “Get Up” program. “They look to us for bringing communities together.
“I think the draft is a great example of that, with restoring hope. It’s hope for our fans. It’s hope for our teams. It’s hope for our players, for these young men who are about to start their careers as prospects and players in the NFL.”
It’s also about commerce — a chance for college players to
cash in on a portion of the $198.2 million that each of the 32 NFL teams has in salary cap allocations for the 2020 season — and about charity, in the form of an accompanying “Draft-aThon” fund-raiser for six national nonprofits.
Marketing is a big part of the draft, too. The NFL’s Player Selection Meeting for years has kept football in the forefront of sports fans’ attention span during what in most years would be the start of baseball season and basketball building toward the NBA playoffs.
But with the NBA and Major League Baseball idled, the NFL and its draft will be the only game in town Thursday night, and audience levels are expected to approach or surpass the 11 million viewers who have watched each of the last two drafts.
Viewers can watch on ESPN, NFL Network and ABC affiliates such as KTRK (Channel 13), in addition to NFL social media channels.
Stay-at-home personnel
The NFL left its longtime home at Radio City Music Hall in New York in 2015 to take its springtime show on the road, and recent drafts have drawn reported crowds of several hundred thousand in Chicago, Philadelphia, Arlington and Nashville.
The league hoped for similarly large crowds this year in Las Vegas, where selected players would have been taken by gondolas to a stage atop the fountains outside the Bellagio hotel and casino.
Instead, Goodell will announce selections from his home in Bronxville, N.Y., and team general managers and coaches will confer not in stadium “war rooms” but via video conferencing tools from their respective homes.
The Texans’ brain trust, which consists of coach and general manager Bill O’Brien, will formulate the team’s selection strategy from a patio at his Houston home. Houston does not have a first-round selection Thursday; its first pick is 40th overall in Friday’s second round.
Instead of a green room in Las Vegas, top draft prospects will await the NFL’s selections at home. ESPN and NFL Network, which will collaborate on the draft broadcast, have sent communications equipment to the homes of at least 58 prospects to record their reactions when they are selected. Many will be in the Houston area, including receiver CeeDee Lamb, offensive lineman Josh Jones and quarterback Jalen Hurts.
“We’ve never had a year like this,” said Seth Markman, ESPN’s production chief. “We have a great opportunity to bring fans across the country a little bit of hope, a little bit of joy, and maybe a bit of escape from what we’re all experiencing day to day.”
Fans can send in booing
Fans, meanwhile, can join in what has been a time-honored tradition at the draft — the chorus of boos that greets Goodell when he comes onstage to announce each first-round selection.
Bud Light Seltzer, an NFL sponsor, has invited fans to send their recorded boos via social media with the tags @budlight and #BooTheCommish. The company will donate $1 for each catcall, with a maximum of $500,000, to the NFL Draft-A-Thon.
While ESPN studio host Trey Wingo will host the selection show on ESPN and NFL Network, the ABC telecast on Channel 13, hosted by Rece Davis, will focus on interviews with selected players and their families and background features designed for non-hardcore football fans.
“That show will focus on the players’ journeys, telling the audience where they came from,” Markman said.
Last year’s ABC personality-oriented program, he said, had a female audience of 46 percent.
With the economy in shambles in the wake of stay-at-home owners and business curtailment over the last month, NFL social media platforms will donate proceeds from the telethon-styled “Draft-A-Thon” to six national charities: the American Red Cross; All of Us: Combat Coronavirus Campaign, sponsored by the Centers for Disease Control’s CDC Foundation; Feeding America; Meals on Wheels; the Salvation Army and United Way.
NFL Network anchor Rich Eisen, who will host the telethon on NFL social media channels with Hall of Fame cornerback Deion Sanders, said the Draft-AThon will feature interviews with athletes, team executives and entertainment figures and offer salutes to workers on the front lines of the COVID-19 recovery effort.
“This is a draft unlike any other, but the adjustments being made are nothing compared to the effort of the people fighting this illness and those whose families have been affected by it and those who are stocking shelves,” Eisen said.
“We hope we can give them a break and give them something to enjoy.”
For NFL fans, the draft begins a new season of playoff and Super Bowl hopes and dreams. For players, it’s the first step on a career that, however brief, can change their lives.
For broadcasters and the NFL itself, it’s an unprecedented technical challenge that involves hundreds of video feeds that will be routed through call centers around the country and fed to ESPN’s control rooms in Bristol, Conn.
Escape mechanism
And for all involved, it’s a night of live entertainment, some intrigue and secondguessing and, perhaps, an escape from another long day in the midst of a pandemic.
Mark Quenzel, who as senior vice president of NFL Media oversees NFL Network, said the success or failure of Thursday’s draft will be determined by whether the communication systems work and whether the NFL sets the proper tone for viewers about the league’s place in these complicated times.
“We want to set the proper tone and let people understand that we hope the draft will provide a distraction or some kind of compelling content for people to see,” Quenzel said.
“That said, we understand there is a much bigger environment out there. How do we communicate that, and how do we weave into the broadcast the important aspects of giving back and understanding that we’re all part of this larger thing together? That will be the biggest factor in success.”
Goodell said in his Wednesday appearance on ESPN that the NFL plans to begin play as scheduled in September but that the league and its teams must be prepared to react to changing circumstances.
“You can’t expect or anticipate every move, but your job is to try to be as prepared as possible,” he said. “So we do that. We’ll continue to do that.
“But we will make sure we’re putting our players in a safe position, our coaches, our team personnel, everybody, our partners. And we’ll make sure that those are the issues that we’ll put first. And ultimately, it’ll probably come down to a league and an owners’ decision.”