God bless ’em, the NFL is trying as hard as it can to be super obtuse over the NFL draft this year.
It goes without saying that this year’s NFL draft will be a fucking bizarre one for the ages. At this point, we still don’t even know if there’s going to be anything that vaguely resembles an NFL season, and so the yearly ritual of a bunch of fans of America’s favorite brain destroying sport hinging their hopes on a bunch of young men in their 20s seems kind of weird to be doing at all. But here we are; the draft is tonight, and the NFL’s cadre of old white men are doing what all old men do in stressful times; clinging stubbornly to what they know, being too stubborn to change, and then changing in the dumbest way imaginable when being forced to.
Take Seahawks general manager John Schneider, a successful man who seems like he should have a big brain, who nevertheless has people knocking down walls in his house to install 25 fucking televisions in his own home. Just what exactly does John Schneider, who drafted Russell Wilson and has crafted teams that are consistently in the run for the Super Bowl and appears to be intelligent, then is going to happen that requires remodeling his home and shoving a bunch of Vizios on the wall? What must his wife be thinking? My wife doesn’t like having a TV in the bedroom. If I decided to install 25 televisions just for one fucking day, she’d probably divorce me.
What about 49ers general manager John Lynch, a man who seemed to have no business being anywhere near a general manager’s office a couple of years ago who crafted the NFC’s representative in the Super Bowl just a few short months ago? John Lynch has (a modest, at least compared to Schneider) 7 TVs, four computer monitors and 3 landlines in his draft bunker. Who the fuck even uses a landline anymore? Who’s gonna be answering all these phones all night? John Lynch must have a fucking cellphone, am I right? Am I crazy to think Lynch could accomplish everything he wanted with one TV, a Microsoft Surface, a cell phone and one landline?
Lions GM Bob Quinn is going to have some poor IT guy outside in a RV all night. Washington coach Ron Rivera has roped his poor family into crossing names off a big board. LA Rams Sean McVay is age and should really know better. I mean, just look at this shit!
As Tom Ley of Unnamed Temporary Sports Blog pointed out, there’s basically nothing these GMs and coaches can’t do with basic, consumer level software like Slack and Zoom. The NFL is thoroughly fixated on making everything it does seem extraordinarily complex, and this is an example of that thinking; just a bunch of white dudes shoving a bunch of tech they don’t need into a “war room” they’ll spend all of three days in, that they barely have to pay attention to for the first three days. Just like it doesn’t take 300 words to call a play, it shouldn’t take an IT team and a set of contractors to do an NFL draft. Millions of people do it all the time in fantasy football and barely pay attention while it happens!
To put a button it all of this, you know you’re overdoing it when Giants general manager David Gettlemen’s set-up seems entirely practical and actually quite fucking smart.
It’s just a draft! You’re not piloting the fucking starship Enterprise!
“If I decided to install 25 televisions just for one fucking day, she’d probably divorce me.”
I’m guessing you’re not as rich as John Schneider.
I think the underlying issue is that nine out of ten NFL GMs are single track minds, and cannot handle contingency planning or multivariable thinking.
I think a big reason you see so many stretch picks and teams making picks with almost no time on the clock is because they planned on trading down, and when the trade falls through they have no Plan B. Or else they are caught flat when the guy they planned on taking is picked a few minutes earlier, and they have no idea what else to do.
So all of these weird tech decisions is a sign of dimwits trying to use technology to solve organizational issues. If you can’t work out your scenarios ahead of time and establish clear lines of communication, stack 25 TVs on a wall so you can pretend it will help you cover your bases.
It kind of reminds me something I was witness too some 15 years ago. The CEO of a tech company was shrieking that his printer didn’t work. The IT gnome managers were freaking out because this old dumb boss insisted that they get the printer (which he bought) working again. The IT gnomes knew that this printer was a goner, but the arrogant dumbshit insisted. It took several layers of management and one cunning IT gnome (who switched printers when dumbshit was out selling our gear to the NYT) and four humorous weeks for them to fix it.
I laughed and laughed till it dawned on me that this was my CEO. At the time I was an employee of Nortel Networks. I wasn’t laughing some 4 years later when we went into bankruptcy taking almost 1/2 my pension with it because our CEO was clueless at tech and with finance.
I want to applaud John Schneider for finding the perfect excuse to get rid of the “study” and a useless bedroom and in its place install a 25-screen video experience. Between working a draft at home and a the-end-is-nigh pandemic, that’s just great strategic planning on his part.
And we all know what Gettleman’s tablet looks like, right?