It’s a tradition truly unlike any other.
During the first round of the draft, reporters do reporting on who the picks will be. News is news, and the goal is to get it — and to disseminate it.
But the draft is fundamentally a TV show. And the TV show is much better when the viewer doesn’t know who the pick will be until the Commissioner walks out to the stage and announces it.
The debate emerges, in some form or fashion, every year. To tip or not to tip. The NFL doesn’t want reporters tied to its broadcast partners to do it. (And it’s not bashful about saying so, even if the edict is inconsistently applied.)
The fact that the league doesn’t want me to tip picks makes me want to do it. But the audience at large doesn’t want that. And that’s what has kept us in the no-tip camp for well over a decade.
It’s ultimately for each viewer to make decisions as to what they will or won’t monitor during the draft. The problem is that plenty of folks want to follow Twitter for interesting nuggets that may emerge between picks. If they do, there’s a very real chance that one of the accounts they follow will spill the beans on a pick that hasn’t been announced.
The only way to evade spoilers is to avoid social media for the entirety of round one. Because it’s inevitable. No amount of finger-wagging from the NFL or those who work directly or indirectly for the league will change that.
The vast majority of the “journalism” in this space consists of tweeting a transaction minutes before it’s announced. The only difference in this case is that everyone knows when the next transaction will be announced. And most prefer to find out that way.
The draft is the closest thing to a football game when it’s not football season. We don’t want to know the outcome of a play before we get to watch it unfold, and we don’t want to know the name of a draft pick before the Commissioner walks back to the podium and recites it.
We’ll continue to defer to the official announcements. But the only way to ensure that none of the picks will be spoiled is to do something we never do for three straight hours, much less for three straight minutes.
Turn the damn phone off.
