ESPN's Draft Coverage Is Disappointing

Another NFL draft has come and gone, and it's possible that you spent much of your weekend glued to a television set laughing at the Raiders and screaming for your team to find the next Tom Brady at the bottom of the sixth-round. If you're like me, you live in an area of the country where your only option for draft day coverage is ESPN's wire-to-wire mayhem.

If you happened to miss the draft, or watched it on the NFL Network, here's what you missed.

Apparently, only the first round matters: Make no mistake, the NFL draft is an important weekend for the 32 franchises fighting for Super Bowl glory. This is where championship teams are built, while head coaches and general managers spend as much time scouting their potential seventh-round picks as they do their potential first-round picks (the good teams do, anyway). So, wouldn't it make some sense if ESPN spent a few minutes covering the picks beyond the first 32? After all, the worldwide leader spent the past two months shoving non-stop draft coverage down our throats, hammering us from every angle, only to, essentially, stop covering it after the opening round. Can't you at least show us the second rounders being announced? Or devote more than 30 seconds on each pick to simply mention their name and what school they went to? Do we really need hours of Matthew Stafford and Mark Sanchez analysis when teams are picking potential starters and impact players in the second and third rounds (and beyond)?

By now, don't we already know about Stafford, Sanchez, Aaron Curry and the rest of the top picks? Wouldn't it be worthwhile to focus on some of the players taken in the second and third rounds that will also make an impact this season and beyond?

Welcome to the NFL Draft, Erin Andrews: ESPN's top sideline reporter and the subject of every male fantasy on every college campus across the country, Erin Andrews made her debut at the NFL Draft this year and there's really only two words that can possibly describe it:

Epic. Fail.

Honestly, this was just a massive pile of sadness. No more than 30 minutes into the pre-draft coverage on Saturday, I was already bored with her presence when she started asking Michael Crabtree the questions we were all demanding answers to ... questions such as: "How many text messages have you received?"

When Crabtree, the top receiver entering the draft, responded that he hadn't read any of them yet, she followed it up with "what's the best one you've received." Wonderful. As if that wasn't enough, she closed out the session by turning to one of Crabtree's relatives and asking him what time the Texas Tech receiver made it back to his hotel on Friday night. The relative, obviously blindsided by the question, had no idea what to say. None of your (expletive) business would have worked just fine. On day two, they hid her in New Jersey with Bill Cosby and former Texas wide receiver Quan Cosby. More on this in a bit.

The Staged Drew Rosenhaus Phone Call: Did anybody else catch that shot of super agent Drew Rosenhaus prior to the start of the draft on Saturday? He was staring into the camera with his telephone glued to his ear, acting as if he were hammering out some sort of draft-day deal. The whole thing seemed forced, as Rosenhaus looked terribly awkward and uncomfortable. When the camera stayed on him too long heading into the commercial break, Rosenhaus abruptly pulled the phone away from his ear and had an are we done with this look on his face. Do football fans really find Rosenhaus so interesting that ESPN felt the need to have him stage phone calls on the biggest day of the offseason? Of course, that uncomfortable scene came just minutes after he was interviewed and announced that Anquan Boldin would have a very good chance of becoming a member of another team by the end of the first round.

Other Observations

... Watching people have their dreams crushed on live television is somewhat disappointing. Throughout the weekend, ESPN had camera's with former Michigan State quarterback Brian Hoyer and former Texas wide receiver Quan Cosby as they waited for an NFL team to call their name. Every hour or so they would go to a live shot of Hoyer sitting on his couch waiting (and hoping!) for his phone to ring. It never rang, and I'll be honest, I felt kind of bad for him.

Meanwhile, Quan Cosby was spending day two of the draft in New Jersey with Erin Andrews and Bill Cosby, which led to a bizarre series of interviews that featured (Bill) Cosby dressed like a Temple Owls football player as he gave Andrews a hard time, while (Quan) Cosby sat off to the side trying to laugh at the absurdity that was taking place around him. Meanwhile, back at Radio City Music Hall, a bunch of guys got picked by some teams. They might play in the NFL one day, they might not. Nobody ever really talked about them.

... In the seventh round Trey Wingo was losing his mind, screaming for teams to just start making random picks because the process was taking too long for his liking. At one point, with the Chicago Bears on the clock, he was yelling because three minutes had gone by (teams have five minutes to make a selection in rounds three through seven) and he couldn't figure out what they could possibly be discussing.

Uh, Trey? Perhaps they're trying to find a good player. He finally turned to Herman Edwards and asked, jokingly (I hope), if teams ever start "throwing darts" and just picking players at random. Thankfully, Edwards brought some sound reasoning to the discussion and explained what teams were looking for at that point in the process. Wingo continued to make jokes about how long it was taking, and continued to scream for teams to just pick somebody. Because, after all, the seventh round is so insignificant that no good players could ever be selected thanks to some sound scouting and research. Just ask Ahmad Bradshaw, Cortland Finnegan, Marques Colston, Matt Cassel, Patrick Crayton, Derrick Ward, Ronald Curry, Brett Keisel, T.J. Houshmandzadeh, Eric Johnson, Patrick Pass, and Donald Driver. Just to name a few in recent years.

In Defense of ESPN

After writing over 1,000 words trashing everything they did this weekend, it's worth keeping in mind that putting on a production around the NFL draft has to be mind-numbingly difficult. This is, after all, nearly 17 hours of television crammed into two days. There's only so much you can talk about during that time to keep it even somewhat interesting (obviously).

My biggest problems with the coverage revolve around the perception that only the first round picks are worthy of coverage, inane interviews asking players about their text messages, and hosts screaming at teams to just pick somebody because they're taking too long in the seventh round.

Basically, offer some more analysis and information on later picks so football fans (the people actually devoting their entire weekend to this thing) learn about the players their team has invested time and money in. I know Mark Sanchez is good. But what can you tell me about T.J. Lang?