The long, dramatic ratings death of ‘man day’
Whatever happened to man day? What happened to that enviable Saturday late each April, when the weather warms, and the sun coaxes you into shorts and a T-shirt. When you and the boys head out to the grocery store to round up as much cheap beer and cheaper shrink-wrapped meat as you can fit in the cart. Where you get together with all those you loved to waste time with, and waste away the day watching the most unexciting, dry sports broadcast, that no true football fan can miss. Whatever happened to that?
It’s ironic, really, that booming broadcast ratings actually killed ‘man day,’ and the NFL Draft could become the victim of its own puzzling popularity this year. Sadly, it will take ‘man day’ down with it. This year, the NFL Draft moves to prime-time in NYC (you’ve probably heard Rihanna singing about it on the ESPN promo), and first round coverage moves to Thursday night. Thursday? Just like that, the all-day man tradition that was Draft Saturday is no more.
Why is it that we love the NFL Draft so much? Do we? Or are we just fooled into it? Each year, when all of the pageantry of the Big Dance fades into obscurity, and the Masters champion donning the fabled green jacket slips from front page, we enter a sort of sports vacuum that sucks the life out of the average sports nut. Our Saturdays—filled for months with a steady diet of consistent college action—are suddenly empty. Our Sundays—dominated for so long by the NFL, and held over by March Madness and the Masters—are swiftly vacated.
Of course there are sports options out there. There is baseball, but lets face it, it’s April. There are at least 150-some games still to be played in the MLB regular season in April, and I think most of the players care as much as the casual fan does about what happens that month. The hockey season ends and the playoffs begin, but for most fans the NHL is a fair-weather home team sport. If you don’t have a horse in that race, you aren’t watching. No offense intended—I’m one of those fans. Basketball, I would say, falls into that category too. Either way, hockey and basketball playoffs are terribly drawn out, and span months. The early rounds of both generally don’t draw huge TV ratings. This is evidenced by the fact that they air on Versus and TBS, respectively. I’m generalizing here, of course, but the truth of the matter is, the majority of sports fans are left high and dry this time of year.
It was a fundamental problem for the media outlets that cover the sports industry. What do you publish in the sports dead zone? It was a problem that Sports Illustrated solved with bikinis and body paint; a problem that ESPN solved this year with Tiger Woods; and a problem that the NFL capitalized on years ago by broadcasting the draft.
The NFL Draft traditionally spans the course of one weekend in April, but it manages to create buzz that radiates for months following the Super Bowl, and through the summer. Ratings for the draft have skyrocketed in the past several years, and it now has a media following unlike any other professional event. ESPN has on-staff draft analysts like Mel Kiper Jr. who could literally talk about the draft until their heads swelled and they hyperventilated. It’s a good thing too.
At face value, the NFL draft is the most boring, drab sports event that you could ever draw up on paper. Fifteen minutes of speculative babble, followed by five minutes of analysis on who each team finally selected—rewind and repeat for three days. It is an event tailor-made for next day newspaper coverage, where some poor schmuck reporter would have to sit through eight painful hours of the draft and put it all into one consolidated list for the interested public. But in the age of instantaneous news, and real-time split-second updates, live coverage of the draft has not just succeeded, it has exploded.
The NFL and ESPN are on a hot streak with draft coverage. Each year’s ratings somehow continue to eclipse the previous, and each year the promos and hype grow in kind. College stars become NFL celebrities before they’ve played a professional down, and first round contracts balloon to levels that leave grizzled NFL vets scratching their heads. It is the over-marketed, under-substanced, NFL equivalent of the late-90’s tech stock bubble.
With all of the recent success of the draft, the move to prime-time might seem a logical step, but I fear the NFL is pushing its luck. My question is simple: is it the event or the traditions people create around it that make the draft so popular? The NFL should be familiar with this paradox. Look no further than the Super Bowl. Not all of the 160-something million people who watched the Super Bowl this year were football fans, but they all wound up at some sort of Super Bowl gathering. It’s the tradition, and not necessarily the event, that makes it so popular. In that sense, moving the first round to Thursday, covering the second and third rounds in prime-time Friday, and airing only late-round coverage on Saturday, could backfire.
To me the draft is not a prime-time event to begin with. It is a monotonous yet interesting backdrop to ‘man day.’ The grill, man-time, and the ice-cold beverages fill the dead space of draft day nicely. It’s not a Friday night kind of event (much less, Thursday), it’s the kind of event suited for a long, sunny, lazy Saturday with the guys.
Who knows, maybe the ratings will spike yet again, and the NFL will flex its proud marketing muscles one more time. Hell, I’ll probably still watch begrudgingly. But one thing is for certain, for me the draft will never be the same if this format holds. Commercialized and split up to appease the network execs, it looses its flavor. And on Saturday, I fear the fourth round and all that come after it will be tough to swallow, even if you washed it down with cheap beer and steak.
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