There are things in sports that I mentally identify as "none of my business," and the NFL Draft is very much one of those. I understand and even sort of honor the expertise of the various experts and sweaty pseudo-experts who will weigh in on it over the days to come, and in an abstract way I admire their ability to have distinct opinions on the relative worth and individual playability of a few hundred athletes. That said, my own brain is oversubscribed and overmatched even relative to the things I am supposed to know or think or write about. There is simply no way that I could make the time to watch J.T. O'Sullivan break down tape on college quarterbacks at this juncture. It is a lucky break that Drew, on the other hand, is most definitely doing that. Luckier still, NBC Sports and Football Outsiders ace Rivers McCown was able to join us on the podcast this week to talk about the NFL Draft and the other mysteries of the NFL's offseason.
It is hard to know very much about the NFL Draft, even when the class is deeper in star quality than this year's apparently is. There are just too many moving parts, too many people and too many variables, as well as too many loose screws and floating signifiers and obvious overt lies from the various teams simultaneously running meatheaded psy-ops against each other. For that reason, and also because the podcast is generally better when we're not super-granular on sports stuff, we addressed the draft in its broader strokes—the various quarterbacks who might or might not be able to carry a franchise's hopes, the seemingly sure-thing running back whose draft position will depend upon the strength of NFL groupthink and whose success or failure might dictate the fate of future running backs, and the relative value of everything. I wouldn't say that we got to the bottom of anything, because I don't think that's possible. But I did go watch some of J.T. O'Sullivan's breakdown of Anthony Richardson, and it wasn't strictly out of my personal loyalty to the Remembering Some Guys lifestyle.
I am a little more comfortable with the legacy idiocies of the NFL than I am with the draft, and we spent some time going over those, too. This included but was not limited to the NFL's Wunderlic personality test replacement and Drew's brief dalliance with flying to another city to take it, as well as the respective limbo experiences of Lamar Jackson and Trey Lance. Remembering A Guy became, as it often does, an opportunity to remember three or four more Guys, with a special emphasis on Houston Texans. The Funbag was opened as well, with questions touching upon the professional use and abuse of psychopathic self-confidence—that one kind of wound up being about football again, unsurprisingly—and a disquisition into best (or in this case worst) practices in carrying food into stadium bathrooms. As NFL teams gear up to make the same mistakes that they make every year, it is good to know that somewhere out there in America, regular people are out there making mistakes no one has ever made before.
If you would like to subscribe to The Distraction, you can do that at Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Stitcher, or wherever else you might get your podcasts. Feel free to discuss this week's episode in the comments below. Thank you as always for your support.
