THE SPECTER OF THE NFL DRAFT: THE ABSURDITY OF PROFESSIONAL SPORTS DRAFTS
Following the night of the first round of the NFL draft I thought it would be a fitting time to talk about professional sports drafts. I’m well aware that I won’t have many people on my side to start out with, but I also know that I have convinced many people quite quickly that professional sports drafts are an insane proposition. That’s what we’ll set out to do in this article here.
A Thought Experiment
Before we dive into it, I want you to imagine something for me: imagine you graduate from college/grad school/professional school and they tell you, “Great work. Now that you have the credentials to perform [blank] task, you can enter your name into the [blank] draft.” You’re a lawyer—all the law firms get to enter into a draft to pick you. You have no choice in where you go. Could be a good fit; could be a bad fit. Could be where you want to be; could be where you don’t want to be. Could have the things you think will conduce to your longer term professional growth, could have none of that. Worried about getting stuck with a bad law firm? Well, here’s the worst part, they get first dibbs!—we want parity in our law firms… You’re a teacher—all the schools in your region get to enter into a draft to pick you. You thought you had a city you wanted to live in? Too bad—if you don’t fit in where you end up, your career as a teacher is over… You’re a doctor… You’re an engineer… You’re a [fill in the blank]…
Europe, USA, and College Sports
Now consider a second scenario, because you may be saying, “well sports are different (for whatever reason) than those other jobs/careers just mentioned”… Or, “Drafts are the only way pro sports operate. This is far too random and radical of a suggestion to take seriously”… Over in Europe, no one is drafted into the Premier League, or La Liga, or Italian Serie A, or the Bundesliga, etc., etc.. Every person who joins a European soccer club does so by their own choosing. They enter into a voluntary contract with the franchise and go from there. Even in college sports here—no one is drafted onto a college sports team. Players get to choose where they go to college, and there’s no less parity at the top of college sports, or in Europe, than there is in American professional sports. As a matter of fact, at the highest levels of success, we see more parity in European sports leagues than we see in America—where a select few teams win the majority of super bowls, NBA championships, etc.. In American pro sports alone are players drafted to their teams, and if they don’t submit to the draft process, they don’t get to enter the league of their respective sport.
Bad Circumstances
If a team is not a good fit for any number of reasons—bad coaching fit for that player’s personality type; bad schematic fit with the coaching scheme; bad management fit; bad geographic fit; bad player personnel fit (i.e. they don’t have other players that align with your strengths, like receivers for a quarterback; offensive linemen for a running back; defensive line for linebackers/defensive backs, etc.)—you are stuck with them and not only have to put up with it if you’re going to remain in the league, if you don’t put up with it you will be labeled the problem by GMs, media, and fans. It’s an absurd situation that highlights how infantilized our engagement with sports have become. Most people don’t consider that if a team wants to get rid of a player, it is very easy for them to curb their minutes, hinder their opportunities, watch their stats decrease, and then claim they’re not effective anymore, green lighting them to discard them without question or retribution. Fans will even carry their water: “The player fell off! They weren’t any good!”
In that list of reasons at the top of the preceding paragraph I mentioned, “bad geographic fit.” Many people really don’t consider this at all. A player may just not be able to live well, with stable psychological or psycho-somatic health, in one area of the country versus another. I couldn’t tell you how many kids come up to Minnesota (or a similar northern state) from down south, having never experienced winter, and by their second year they are suffering from debilitating seasonal depression. It gets dark early. It’s so cold their bones hurt. They get sick more often. They don’t have family near them. They don’t want to go outside and they’re totally isolated within a matter of weeks. Think this is absurd: How many of your wives would experience the same thing if they had to live in the winter tundra 6 months a year? They never grew up learning how to live through a winter—how to engage in different winter activities than you’d do in the summer to make winter something you look forward to; something you appreciate… Many bougie adults that grew up in the north also don’t know how to do this—and they get seasonal depression up here all the same.
Justice: Giving One Their Due
At bottom, the question of the wrongness of professional sports drafts is actually a question of justice. The shorthand definition of justice is giving one their due. Even more intrinsic to a person than the money you give them is their capacity to make a bare-minimum autonomous decision. If from there they sellout, then that’s on them—and their soul will suffer the consequences. But that bare-minimum autonomy is a matter of recognizing human dignity.
There is no just entry into a contract when someone doesn’t have the autonomy to decide where they’re going should they be in high enough demand to do so. It’s worth acknowledging that many players have to accept whatever offer comes their way because they don’t have any better options—as is the case for many people in our workforce today. But it would be ridiculous to suggest that because someone is in low demand by their workforce, everyone has to be subject to the same restricted scenario.
Macro Considerations
Ultimately, this leads inevitably to the consideration of some of the macro conditions that drive any workforce. Supply-side interests are favored when there’s an excess of demand, or when there’s an unjust constraint of the supply (i.e. monopolies). In the American economy we have the flooding of labor with unending influx of people into the workforce, reducing everyone’s earning and bargaining potential. In pro sports, we have both of these things—extremely high demand and extremely constrained supply. (Note: in 5 “premier” soccer leagues in Europe there are roughly 100 teams; in America there are 30 per sport, and we have more people in that mix, and far more people playing youth sports, than those countries combined.) The constraining of the professional sports supply by monopolizing the pro sports leagues and guaranteeing franchises rights to remain indefinitely in their respective leagues has entirely advantaged the owners/coaches. A just landscape of sports, then, would have to break up the league-franchise monopolies by at least implementing promotion-relegation into every major sports league—if not dismantling the pro leagues themselves and forcing them to have at least 2 or 3 leagues—and eliminating drafts so that players and coaches enter into mutually voluntary contracts with one another.
Competitive Excellence
These aren’t proposals meant to undermine the competitiveness of our pro-sports leagues. Quite the opposite! They’re all geared toward increasing the competitive tension and excellence in our pro-sports. Franchises would have to scout well, handle player relations well; players would have to develop to benefit their teams. Franchises wouldn’t be able to tank at the end of a year. Bad owners would be punished. Good owners would be rewarded. Coaches that can’t balance player approval with on field success would be cycled out of their position. Any team that wanted to buck any of these principles and insert someone into a position by unmerited fiat, and keep them there regardless of incompetence, would pay an immediate and measurable price.
There is so much nepotism in the coaching & management rungs of our professional sports. Just about every coach over the age of 50 has one or more of their sons on their coaching staff or in their respective league somewhere, despite having never played at a high level, having no exceptional knowledge or insight or pedagogical skill, and being complete bums. This straight nepotism (the granting of positions and favors to family members) is only outstripped by the quasi-nepotism even more prevalent where coaches and management grant positions and favors to friends of theirs for no greater reason than them being their friends. Merit is nearly gone from the middle and upper-middle ranks of all our sports—and it’s no wonder that the same has coincided in our society at large. All that is left is occasional random bursts of excellence and a bunch of oppressed competence. We are living in the height of an anti-competitive society, looking over the edge at our potential collapse, and the degraded product in our professional sports has directly caused the cynicism and substancelessness in our players and superstars we have today. Whether the degradation of our broader culture and society either preceded, or succeeded, this reality is secondary to the realization that we have an objectively weak artistic and recreational landscape, and it has affected everything for the worse.
One of my deepest propositions is that three fundamental institutional nodes must be excellent, inside-and-out, to possess a great nation today: education, sports, and prisons. Education for the formation of the individual; sports for the modern artistic-cultural excellence of a given society; and prisons for handling the parasites of vice and evil that exist always and everywhere. +