The NFL Draft Preview! or, I am the total package!

(l,r: Calvin Johnson, Calvin Johnson)

The NFL Draft is completely ridiculous. Not to say that last year when I had cable I didn't watch nearly the entire two-day event. But I've decided it is popular, or at least attracts a lot of attention in the press, for the following reasons:

1. Biggest Football weekend between the Super Bowl and the start of the next season. In fact, the ONLY football weekend between the Super Bowl and the start of preseason/training camp, which is interesting only in finding out which assholes are holding out or reporting late.
2. Hope. No matter how bad your team is, you have a chance to grab the next All-Time Great Player. Odds are slim (I'd say one third of all first round picks are complete busts, and another third merely ordinary), but the fact that there is a chance makes this the best day of the year if you are a Lions or Browns fan. Save your cynicism for every other day.
3. Sports pundits can pretend they know something we don't. Usually everyone on ESPN or sports radio babbles their own opinions that are no more well-informed than the average sports fan. But leading up to the draft they can enlighten us with details of a Division 1-AA player's 40 time and vertical jumps. I think this keeps them from killing themselves for another year.

It's interesting to think that for some of the young athletes getting picked, this weekend it'll be the highlight of their lives. Most won't amount to much, and they'll never be as highly regarded as they were one day at the end of April. Regardless, they will all (at least early rounders) be very rich.

***

Ignore the above lazy writing, what I really want to know is what percentage of the population realized the Calvin Johnson connection early last fall. I'm not bragging here, but simply confessing that when anyone on TV or otherwise talked about the Georgia Tech receiver I got a off-key baritone voice stuck in my head. It's a curse, really, having so much knowledge.

The reason this seems important to me is that for the most part, old chums excluded, most of my Chicago friends fall into one of two camps: sports or arts. As in, I have people that I invited to my fantasy baseball league, and I have people that I go see shows with and borrow books from. These two groups never meet each other, which is weird, since both seem to have heavy drinking in common. This is not to say people in one category have no interest in the other, it's just that they do one thing well and may fall short of the other, like when Bill Simmons tries to recommend music (yikes.) The issue for me, sitting alone in the small intersection of this particular Venn diagram, is that if I talk about music or film with The Sports People, or vice versa, is that I can come across as a condescending jerk. Perhaps because I am, I suppose, but why should I be punished for my unquenchable thirst for knowledge?

I'm kidding. I'm just puzzled why these two categories seem so exclusive from each other. I would think at least that sports is an easier subject to get into, due to the current flood of information across cable and the web, not to mention the perpetual coverage in newspapers going back forever; it's not as if anyone was putting out homemade sports-themed fanzines as a kid. Also, with sports you have more of a multi-generational thing, where a father can educate and pass along his routing interests to the son. (I guess you can have the same thing with arts, particularly literature, but it much more common for a kid to listen to music that his parent's don't understand, right? And most people would rather be taken to a baseball game than to a concert by their parents.). My use of the term 'arts' implies some sort of education, but, literature aside, I'm not really sure if that's the case. (I've probably learned more about film from Roger Ebert than from film classes in college). I do suppose you should enjoy reading though, as there never will be an ESPN for this sort of thing.

I give up, this is going nowhere. Indulge me and give me your thoughts.