I’ve been a big football fan for as long as I can remember.  Watching the draft isn’t one of my favorite moments as a football fan, or as a sports fan in general, with how tedious and boring the proceedings are; but I know how important it is.

But the one problem I figured with the NFL Draft that I could think of right off the bat is the idea of signing draft picks, i.e the number one pick, ahead of the start of the draft.

Why do I think this is bad?

Here are some reasons.

It takes away of the surprise of the first overall pick.  We might already know that a team,  for example Indianapolis picking Andrew Luck in this year’s draft, but the minute or two after the start of the draft waiting for that first pick is still a little bit of a adrenaline rush of a possible switch of players or a trade of picks.

It ruins the rest of the draft.  I mean who wants the number two team to start the draft.  The draft is already boring as it is why skip over the best pick in the draft (next to the last one when everyone celebrates the end of it).  Everyone ultimately tunes out by pick five, pick 10 and just checks in when there team is picking or see whom they picked.

It’s additional pressure on the number one pick, in my opinion.  The number one pick has all of this pressure anyway, but if your chosen ahead of the draft as that number one pick, I believe that the pressure is increased two-fold because the team is relying on you more-so to win and be the next big thing than if they would’ve waiting until the draft already started.

Now it’s hard to cap teams from doing this; but I wonder if putting a cap on teams doing this would help increase the popularity and the excitement of the draft with the first pick still waiting to be picked.