Equilibrium

Photo by Matthew Wiebe
image courtesy of unsplash.com

The thing I learned about the NFL draft that I thought was most interesting was its undisguised goal of promoting balance in the league.

Well maybe not balance per se, but at least the chance for competition; apparently the draft first started as a way to keep the most successful teams from continually signing the best new players and simply being more successful.  While no expert, I am originally from Buffalo, and can tell you that one-sided football games are typically a lot less interesting to watch.

For those who don't know, the basic idea of the rules of the draft are that the teams who did the least well in the preceding season get first pick of the new players, that is, college football soon-to-be-graduates, or basically anyone good enough to turn pro who's been out of high school for three years, whether they've been playing on an actual team or not.

The teams that didn't even make it to the playoffs pick first, the team that won the latest super bowl gets to pick last.

So I suppose the fact that the league felt it was necessary, in order to ensure their continued existence as a form of compelling entertainment, to try and ensure that their is at least some sort of struggle to keep it interesting.  If the same teams always win year after year, it might be interesting to a select few diehard fans, but the rest of humanity would most likely stop tuning in just to see a sure thing.

Then again, when I wandered a bit on the wikipedia, I learned that Super Bowl XXIX (or is it 29, are we doing only Arabic numerals now?) was expected to be a one-sided game by pretty much everyone, a game between the 49ers and the far less favored San Diego Chargers, and even though that is exactly what happened, it still had strong ratings.  But then, it's the Super Bowl.