The NFL Draft is one of the league’s premiere events, drawing huge ratings over the years, but not everyone is necessarily a fan of it.
ProFootballTalk’s Mike Florio spoke out against the very idea of the draft in his book, “Playmakers: How the NFL Really Works,” calling the process “anti-American.”
“The draft reflects Anti-American values,” Florio, a former labor lawyer, wrote, per Awful Announcing. “It restrains movement and flexibility and the inherent realities of self-determination. It forces men not long removed from being boys to move to places they otherwise would never choose to live, often hundreds if not thousands of miles from the places they’d prefer to start their professional lives.”
Florio further explained his stance in an interview with Awful Announcing.
“It really is un-American,” he said. “There is no industry other than professional sports where someone who enters a workforce cannot pick where they are going to live, cannot pick who they’re going to work for, cannot pick who they’re going to work with. They just have to submit.
“The players are brainwashed. The fans are brainwashed. We just accept that’s the way it is. You can’t push back against it. Well, you can. They just don’t do it often enough.”
John Elway did it in 1983, refusing to play for the Baltimore Colts and threatening to play baseball before being traded to the Denver Broncos.
Eli Manning also pushed back in 2004 in a similar move where he made his intentions clear that he would not play for the San Diego Chargers, resulting in a trade to the New York Giants.
Those are rare instances, though, and both were consensus No. 1 overall picks.
Yet, the draft continues to go on as it does. It is a ratings machine for the NFL, but also it is collectively bargained by the players’ union, so they agree to conduct business this way.
“If you take away the union, it’s a blatant antitrust violation,” Florio added. “It’s no different than in a given community a kid gets a job after school. You have burger King, McDonald’s, Subway, Taco Bell and Arby’s, and they decide who is going to get dibs on which kid.”
Perhaps the biggest reason why the league would rather have a draft than allow rookies to enter a free agent pool is because it allows teams to control the costs of players.
Rookie salaries are based on where a player is selected in the draft and there is only a certain amount of money they can be given, leaving little to no room for negotiation.
It’s unlikely any drastic changes will be happening to the NFL Draft any time soon, but Florio hopes to open up some eyes to how the whole process works.
“Sometimes you just have to peel the curtain back and show people this is really how it’s happening,” he said. “Maybe there are some issues people should be concerned about, even if they’re not.
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