Oh, and Johnny Manziel too.
The NFL has, to its credit if you believe it's a good thing, done a pretty amazing job of turning its off-season into a spectacle almost equal to that of the season itself. (Reminder: the subject of spectacle and its relationship to the ongoing concern of this blog was introduced in the previous post.) This itself is not necessarily unique to the NFL, but what is particularly of interest is how much of this off-season spectacle revolves around young men who have played absolutely zero snaps in the league as of yet.
Major League Baseball has long enjoyed an offseason spectacle of sorts, so old and traditional that it earned itself a nickname -- the "hot stove league" -- that has long outlived the source of the name. That bit of spectacle revolves around the trading or potential trading of players and, in more recent years, the signing or potential signing of free agent players. As with much of baseball, the hot stove season unfolds in a relatively leisurely fashion, with occasional spasms of activity around certain off-season markers such as the Winter Meetings or general managers meetings in which trades were often culminated in the past. But again, the emphasis is on players who have established themselves and in some cases are about to get obscenely rich. What the NFL has done is make an all-consuming spectacle of a sequence of events, from NFL scouting combine to the draft itself, out of players entering the league, rather than familiar faces in the league.
Of course, it helps that the players are not exactly unknown. Thanks to the popularity of college football, the league doesn't have to introduce these wannabe-NFL players from nowhere -- in many cases these guys are pretty familiar already. On the other hand, many of the players who become "stars" in the draft -- early draft choices, the number one pick, and so forth -- are not necessarily the ones who became most famous in the NCAA. Really, how much did you follow Carson Wentz's career (North Dakota people, put your hands down) before he became a potential #1 or #2 pick? And when a team settles on an offensive lineman for their draft pick, that player isn't going to be as famous as the Heisman Trophy winner.
No matter. First the combine -- a glorified workout session -- leading to the final frenzied push to the draft itself. People now make actual careers out of projecting the draft's results. (Looking at you, Mel Kiper.) What used to be a Saturday afternoon affair has now blown up into a three-day event, although how many people actually stick around for the sixth and seventh rounds isn't necessarily clear.
NOTE: yes, the NBA does a similar thing with its draft, although it's only two rounds and contained in one evening, and there's nothing like the NFL combine. Also, the number of international players that get drafted in that league require a bit of introduction that even the most obscure o-lineman doesn't on Draft Day.
And yes, there was even a Kevin Costner movie about the NFL draft, at least nominally. (At least it didn't wipe out as badly as the FIFA movie.)
There's a reason I'm alluding to the NFL Draft here, in a blog that concerns itself most frequently with the traumatic effect of the game of football on some substantial chunk of its players. It is at the draft, and during the combine and process leading up to it, that the commodification of the athlete is most clearly on display.
The combine is, frankly, a meat market. The appeal of a bunch of post-college guys standing around in their tighty-whities getting measured and poked and prodded escapes me. At least the potential draftees get to put on clothes before they go out on the field in Indianapolis and run and jump and throw or catch footballs, while Important Men with stopwatches stand around and look important and measure things.
From there NFL scouts will also make visits to various college campuses for "pro days," in which players who for whatever reason don't get to the combine are measured and commodified. Meanwhile the Kipers of the world issue weekly updates about Who Will Be Drafted When, with the breathless urgency of the live updates from Baghdad during one Iraq war or another. It will get louder and more breathless until this weekend.
At the draft itself a select pool of likely high draftees is invited to demonstrate their fashion sense, or lack thereof, while sometimes getting phone calls and otherwise waiting for their names to be called, to find out which franchise controls their fate and how much money they will or won't make. They might get interviewed, or filmed hugging their weeping mother or who knows what. They'll walk to the podium, endure a handshake from Roger Goodell, hold up a replica jersey or ball cap, and be shuffled off to be discussed endlessly.
ESPN or the NFL Network will try to convince you that these players are Real People, with lives and families and interests outside of football. This is less untrue than it is irrelevant. What matters most, what matters at all from this point forward is their value or usefulness to the franchise that drafted them. If it doesn't work out for the team, well, remember that NFL contracts, aside from signing bonuses, are not guaranteed.
And even that human-interest angle is, in the end, part of the spectacle. One would think we were choosing our representatives to defend Earth in some kind of interplanetary battle royale.
Perhaps the most revealing spectacle, one that isn't necessarily going to happen at every draft but happens just often enough, is the Player Who Slides Down The Draft Board. This is usually a fairly famous collegian (the spectacle works best if it's a quarterback) expected to be drafted pretty high, who instead gets passed over by team after team until suddenly we're down around the 20s in picks and he's the only guy left in the green room. This becomes a spectacle rather like that of vultures circling a wounded animal. What went wrong? Why is everybody passing on him? What ugly secret do these teams know about him? It gets pretty grotesque, really, until some team finally pulls the trigger and drafts the kid.
This happened to Aaron Rodgers eleven years ago, and he turned out okay. He fell all the way to the 24th pick in the first round of that draft before the Green Bay Packers selected him. He had to wait a few years for Brett Favre to clear out, but things have turned out pretty well for Rodgers, and his draft slippage only comes up to demonstrate, as here, that it didn't hurt his career so much.
This also happened to Johnny Manziel.
You may remember two years ago that Manziel, carrying the monicker "Johnny Football" and a reputation towards recklessness both on and off the field, tumbled through the first round before being drafted 22nd by the Cleveland Browns.
Now Aaron Rodgers and Johnny Manziel are extremely different people. Rodgers has, for one thing, a life beyond football, or perhaps more accurately an awareness of how to leverage his football fame for things beyond football, and generally seems a level-headed sort. These are not words that fit well with Manziel. Further, Rodgers slid into possibly the best possible football situation for him, while Manziel slid into the dumpster fire that is the Cleveland Browns.
Manziel was pretty well-known as a party animal when drafted. It couldn't have been a surprise that he didn't immediately transform into a choir boy upon being drafted. Even so, his two-year descent from hope of the franchise to outcast is pretty striking.
The troubling possibility I can't escape is that Johnny Manziel, the spectacle, was more useful to football than Johnny Manziel, the football player, at least until he started hitting his girlfriend. Until he invited the ugly spectacle of Ray Rice back into fans' memories, the screwup, the struggle to do anything useful on the field while continuing to be a party boy off it, was a useful storyline. The Browns can't really be any more embarrassed than they usually are, and they get to cut Manziel loose, sign Robert Griffin III, and be in line to draft the aforementioned Carson Wentz, who doesn't initially look like that much of a party boy. The NFL gets to pat itself on the back for maneuvering an abuser out of the way.
The spectacle serves to keep all eyes on the league. A quiet offseason doesn't serve a league that thinks $25 billion (yes, billion) in annual profits is its natural right. Keeping enough eyes bedazzled to sustain a whole network and a daily ESPN show all year long is paramount, not to mention selling jerseys and all that stuff.
In a league where commodification and spectacle and distraction are as paramount as all this, would you really trust the higher-ups to give a damn about the health of your brain, not to mention the rest of your body?
Not if that brain is working, you wouldn't.
Would you also expect the fans who buy all the stuff, who shout obscenities at you before you're even drafted, who spew bile anonymously on sports radio and internet comment sections, to have your back?
Yeah, right.
So if the DeAndre Levys of the world are taking their own health into their own hands, it is only because it has become clear to them that they are the only ones who will.
The number of ways the NFL Draft is a disturbing spectacle would require an entire blog even to begin to express its breadth and depth.
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