A few days before the start of the 2026 NFL Draft, Peter Schrager took to his podcast and social media to beg viewers to stay off social media and not spoil themselves with each pick. Part of his argument was that reporters who get the pick before it’s announced aren’t actually doing anything special:
It’s because the NFL requires that name to be sent to them, and the entire league gets that name three minutes before the pick is made. Anyone who’s got a credential has one source in the league, and that one source in the league, whether it be from the 32 teams or the league office or an agent, they have access to the picks 90 seconds before they’re announced. There is no valor in spoiling an NFL draft pick, so don’t give that joy or that “attaboy” to those who are leaking it beforehand.
What Schrager is getting at is that the draft you see on TV isn’t the actual draft, only the public announcement of what happened at the draft. Everyone who actually matters, from the league to the teams to the agents to even the players being picked, knows what happened at least 90 seconds before the commissioner (or whoever) takes the stage. You can tell, because when the clock on ESPN or NFL Network changes to showing “Pick Is In”, what’s actually happening is that the next team in the draft order is already on the clock and it’s already ticking down, and if either network has a good shot of the draft theater, you can actually see how much time is left on that clock. For that matter, it’s far from uncommon for that next team to have already submitted their pick as well, and for the team after them to be on the clock, or have already submitted their pick, and so on – especially on the second night and in the fourth round, before ESPN and NFL Network stop showing every pick announcement starting in the fifth. All the drama about trades and who teams are going to pick that the announcers talk about? As far as the actual decision-makers are concerned, it all already happened minutes ago. (The draft isn’t even necessarily taking place in the place that’s “hosting” the draft, but in war rooms in team offices across the country, and since the pandemic, in the homes and other places where team personnel can Zoom in.)
So it’s understandable that viewers want to follow along with the actual draft and not the made-for-TV production the NFL presents as the draft. When Schrager implores viewers to “be shocked once in a while, be blown away when your team makes a pick that you didn’t expect, be disappointed when your team takes the other guy when you wanted player A”, there’s nothing stopping them from doing those things however they find out about each pick. Sure, it may not be as “fun” “to read it on a tweet 90 seconds before Goodell says it”, but if there’s a stream out there where someone’s following along with the pick-tippers and announcing those as they come across, you can, theoretically, still get something resembling the same experience that way. Hell, the ESPN-affiliated Pat McAfee did his own draft coverage in 2024 where he tipped picks, or at least heavily hinted at them, freely. (And as Awful Announcing points out, “there’s no valor in being the first to report that an NFL team has signed a second-string punter, but ESPN, Fox Sports, NFL Network, Adam Schefter, Ian Rapoport, and the rest have made a living around that. The draft is no different.”)
There are good reasons for the league to delay the announcement of each pick relative to when the rest of the league finds out about it; the networks use that time to prepare relevant graphics and the pick’s highlight package, and if the pick is in the green room, they need time to fire up the hot press for the jersey they pose with on stage. And if the pick is due to be announced by a team legend, a fan, or a Make-A-Wish kid, that person needs to be rounded up and escorted to the stage, which can especially cause delays if there’s a late trade. But often, the difference between the “three minutes” Schrager starts his video with and the “90 seconds” he ends it on comes down to the draft broadcast being in commercial break when the pick comes in – or sometimes, especially in rounds two through four, going to break with the pick already in. That effect is compounded because the league needs to wait for all the draft broadcasts to come out of commercial, and they don’t all go to break at the same time because they have different groups of people speaking, take different amounts of time to analyze the pick, and so on. Just the fact that, until this year, ESPN and NFL Network conducted separate on-stage interviews with each pick that comes out of the green room causes it to take longer to move on to the next pick if it’s already in, or for the network that conducts the second interview to go to break, which causes a cascading effect on the next pick announcement. That’s one reason I felt it was insane for the league to talk about giving the draft “presidential-election-style” coverage on every network a few years back, which would have just created more networks to try to synchronize breaks for.
This year, with ESPN taking over ownership of NFL Network, the league had just the one on-stage interview with each pick simulcast on both networks, but that was more than outweighed by the decision to reduce the time between picks to eight minutes from ten. The league’s admirable goal was to cut down on how long the night took, and the whole round did manage to be completed in under three hours, but the ultimate result was that even in the first round, for most of the night picks were lined up like “planes on the runway at JFK” to use the phrase Rich Eisen used to use on the second night. With the time between pick announcements extended by the pageantry of prospects coming from the green room to be recognized on stage, causing the backups to be that much worse, it felt like the league was abandoning even the pretense that what was happening in Pittsburgh was anything other than a made-for-TV spectacle, not the actual draft.
Only when the Steelers used all but 50 seconds of their time (in large part because they were blindsided by what happened a pick ahead of them) did the broadcast catch up to the actual picks, and only after that did we get our first break to be taken with no picks waiting to be announced for the entire night. By the time the twelfth pick had been announced and Mike Greenberg was blatantly hinting that the Rams had taken Ty Simpson as ESPN went to break, I decided I had had enough of the official broadcasts and focused my attention primarily on the stream from The 33rd Team’s Check the Mic podcast, except at those times when the draft broadcast was caught up to the picks. (Ironically, I followed it much less the second night as the official celebration did a better job of keeping up with the picks, to the point that it was actually the podcast stream that was falling behind.)
Between the official, public draft celebration being ten minutes or more behind the actual draft (far from the three minutes or 90 seconds Schrager talked about), and analysts being left with no time to breathe or speculate from one pick to the next, the delays became a widespread topic of conversation on social media, though some people did like the breakneck pace or considered it a necessary evolution. If all you’re concerned about is creating the best TV show, cutting down on dead time where a pick isn’t actually being made or broken down would seem to be a viable approach in the limited-attention-span era. But I can’t help but imagine how it feels to people on site when picks are announced one after the other, one or two minutes apart if no one’s in the green room, right after the last pick gets off stage if they were… except that every so often the parade of picks screeches to a halt for three minutes even if there are picks waiting to be announced, reminding everyone that the whole song-and-dance is really there for TV.
And even on TV, the cadence of pick announcement, highlight package, then on to the next pick, can make the ritual of the commissioner or a team legend coming to the stage to declare “with the 42nd pick, the New Orleans Saints select…” feel vestigial, a relic of the days when ESPN simply set up shop in a hotel ballroom to show Pete Rozelle announcing each pick to the press, the same press that now undercuts those announcements because they only bare a superficial relation to what they once were, with no relation in function. Something I’ve been struck by when I’ve watched the WNBA draft is that, as the draft goes along into the second and third round, Ryan Ruocco will make pick announcements himself from ESPN’s desk if the pick isn’t in the green room and they aren’t in commercial. That’s the only sport that does anything like that that I’m aware of, but it’s a reminder that the pageantry of the pick announcement these days is mostly for show, that it could have been an email and not lost its function. I’ve complained in the past about ESPN and NFL Network not respecting draft picks in the later rounds, but that’s mostly about when they don’t cover picks at all because they’re wasting time on draft-wide analysis, interviews, reminiscence, games, and general nonsense; I don’t think I needed the individual pick announcements in the third and fourth rounds to be synchronized with when the broadcasts are ready for them (when it’s not a super-famous player or massive slider), at the expense of getting that information out in a timely fashion. (At least in the fourth round this year ESPN and NFL Network de-synchronized their breaks so picks could be announced on one network but not the other, allowing them to get out faster.)
The NFL decided long ago to treat the draft as a made-for-TV reality show rather than something to cover live as it happens (although I actually think the draft was better TV when the broadcast crew had more time to speculate and could show green-room prospects getting phone calls – witness Ben Roethlisberger getting the call from the Steelers in 2004), but if the NFL treated pick-tipping as an experience that said reality show needs to compete with rather than just shaming it, they’d take steps to minimize the time between when a pick comes in and when it’s announced as much as possible. That means having one definitive draft broadcast that, if not the only one allowed to cover the draft and show the pick announcements, is at least the only one the league is willing to wait for and the only one allowed to interview draft picks on stage. During the first two rounds this broadcast should never go to break if a pick is already in, but except for early in each day, should always go to break if it’s done discussing one pick and the next pick is still on the clock, or at least if the next pick has more than three or four minutes left on the clock. (The exception is if the broadcast didn’t take as many breaks as they needed to and there are now as many breaks left to take as picks remaining.) For the third and fourth rounds this broadcast can go back to not showing every pick live, allowing some picks to be made during commercials, but the league should make a stream available showing everything draft-related that’s happening on stage, including every pick announcement, and there should be some sort of breakdown of every single pick available somewhere.
(Before the pandemic the league had a stream that, at least on the third day, was just the pick announcements and breakdowns of every pick, with no interviews or other shenanigans that could lead it to ignore some picks entirely like ESPN and NFL Network can engage in, and very few ads, just a handful of in-house promos at the top and bottom of each hour. In 2020 it was seemingly replaced with a separate, celebrity-filled stream as part of the “telethon” the league tried to turn the draft into, but it didn’t seem to return in its prior form in the following years, at least at first. The NFL’s FAST channel does a “Draft Center” broadcast from a studio that sticks to showing pick announcements and breaking them down, but it takes the same full-length ad breaks as the traditional networks and doesn’t always break down picks missed during commercials. Still, if you actually care about who’s being picked in the fifth through seventh rounds, I would still recommend it over either of the traditional broadcasts, and if ESPN decides to shut down the NFL Network broadcast and fold some of its personnel onto its own broadcasts, I would hope they’d replace it with something like this, or perhaps reform it into something like this instead.)
Last year I broke down how much time the league opens up for pick-tipping through its refusal to consolidate draft coverage to a single broadcast and optimize when commercial breaks are taken, finding that for some picks the league could allow more than three minutes to elapse unnecessarily, and that under the old ten-minute pick time, a single broadcast could get the same number of breaks in even if it only takes them when the pick is in. It wouldn’t have saved much in the way of time, certainly compared to the reduction in time between picks – last year’s first round ended after midnight and the last pick was announced “only” five minutes after it was made – but it would have better respected the viewer’s time and intelligence, made the best use of dead time between picks, and reduced the salience of pick-tipping, especially in the middle of the first round.
At one point the Check the Mic hosts said that, earlier in the night, they had “given up” on waiting for the official draft celebration to announce each pick, but they should not be ashamed to be talking about each pick before they’re made “official”. NFL fans are wholly in the right if they wish to turn off the TV entirely, reject the party the NFL and its partners pretend is the draft, and find a way to follow the actual draft as it happens, not when the league gets around to announcing each pick to the plebes. It doesn’t have to mean sacrificing the emotion that comes with following the draft, only not waiting to have that emotion when the league and its networks want you to. The conscious decision to follow pick-tippers should be seen in this light, as a wholly justifiable reaction to the league attempting to dictate what its fans see as reality, at a time when people have never been more resistant to authorities trying to tell them what reality is. If the NFL wishes to continue passing off Thursday’s parade of pick announcements broken up by three-minute commercial breaks as the draft, fans shouldn’t be expected to just sit there and take it.