Keepers of the Futures
April 27th, 2007 | by LA Bob |
Lately, I’ve spent a lot of time in draft forums and team sites reading about all the 300 or so of the players that will be selected this weekend and thereby granted the opportunity to have a Future in the National Football League.
Much of what I am reading is the same stuff you read every year — this guy has a hamstring, that guy is a Phi Beta Kappa, this guy runs a 4.38 40 and has a 40 inch vertical jump, that guy smoked pot out behind the dorm, this guy got drunk and slapped his girlfriend silly. Teams make stuff up about guys they don’t want anybody else to pick, fan a little smoke around the picks they intend to make, and otherwise play the yearly game of bargaining over horseflesh and trying to bite, scratch and claw their way to the best draft they can manage.
Every year so far, I have pretty much just floated downstream with the whole deal, trying to keep my nose above the water line and be aware of what was going on, but this year I have bonked headfirst into a log in the stream, and my enjoyment is troubled with a headache. For the lack of a better tag to pin on it, I guess I’ll just call it conscience.
Yup. All of a sudden, out of a clear blue sky, I had a tremendous feeling of a compromised conscience. Not guilt exactly, for it isn’t any of my doing. But once I had this feeling, a few weeks ago actually, I knew that, at some point before the Draft, I would write it down and here it is.
Keepers of the Futures. Maybe you thought it was a typo when you read it earlier, but it’s not. The plural is intentional. The 32 teams of the National Football League are the Keepers. They are in charge of the Futures of the players they draft and the players they hire in other ways. The teams are charged with the responsibility to identify and KEEP OUT any players who are undeserving of an NFL Future, just as much as they are responsible to identify and BRING IN the players who DO deserve an NFL Future.
The equation is simple: for every undeserving player who sneaks past the gates and infects the game of football, another deserving player gets the gates slammed in his deserving face while he AND the game both suffer.
But while the problem is a simple one, the choosing is anything but simple. Players, college coaches, agents, family — they swarm all over a player’s prior bad acts with excuses, explanations, glossy re-writes and big-league spin-doctoring until their slimy little Goldmine of a ballplayer looks like the greatest thing since Billy Graham. All they need to do is get one out of 32 teams to swallow their story, and Goldmine steps into somebody else’s rightful Future. And, of course, if Goldmine can actually play BALL, well, the number of teams ready to ignore their responsibility and give another kid’s Future to their boy Goldmine goes up exponentially.
My conscience says “hold it! There has to be a better way”.
Personally, I think there should be another combine. Not just the testing and interview times at the present combine, but a whole ‘nother combine where reps of the 32 teams examine all the Goldmine stories in detail and take out the trash, league-wide, irrespective of talent, once and for all.
Would this hurt? Absolutely. Would an occasional good kid be misunderstood and lose out as a result? Maybe, but I think not as often as bad kids are getting past the gates right now. Besides, a really good kid will make his own Future even if he does get misunderstood and tossed out of football.
I just can’t get past my feeling that there are great football players who are great people and who will never get a chance at a Future they deserve because a bunch of posers, bozos and outright criminals are occupying their lockers and wearing their uniforms.
You hear a lot of stories about guys who have succeeded in the NFL without great physical talent. You hear just as many stories about guys with monstrous physical talent who squander their gifts on bad behavior. I guess I’d just like to remind the teams in the NFL that like it or not, easy or difficult, the choices must be made — the Futures must be kept safe for the players who deserve them, and they, the teams, are the Keepers. And there are only so many Futures to go around.
