Football and baseball.
For my entire life the question of what is America’s number one sport has revolved around those two activities. When I was a kid, it was baseball, but today one would be hard pressed not to lean football’s way for the answer.
One way to see the difference between the two was how George Carlin pinned baseball as the nicer sport of the two. After all, baseball has bunts, sacrifices and walks, while football has blitzes, tackles and blocks.
There is another way to judge the difference between the two sports.
What is the biggest off-season event for the two?
In baseball, the Hall of Fame voting and inductions take center stage as the only event that captures a large portion of the population during the baseball offseason. The Hall of Fame is looking back, celebrating accomplishments already complete.
Baseball is romantic by nature. It conjures up memories of the greatest players. As a kid I had Willie Mays and Mickey Mantle to celebrate, and my Dad would counter that the best ball players were from the past, Joe Dimaggio and Ted Williams.
While baseball looks back with the Hall of Fame, the most significant event during the football off-season is the National Football League draft. All about the future. Fans take great pride in knowing who their hometown team should draft and seem to possess the ability to determine whether they did well or not in their selections before the kids even show up for an initial practice with their new teams.
That’s it. Baseball looks back, and football looks forward.
When the NFL holds their annual allocation of college talent this month fan bases and sports writers alike will grade teams on who did well and who didn’t. I took part in a number of drafts with the Oakland Raiders. One year I spent in the Raiders drafting room the Pittsburgh Steelers put together what many consider the best draft class of all-time. Among the players selected by the Steelers in 1974 were four players that went on to Hall of Fame earning careers, namely Lynn Swann, Jack Lambert, John Stallworth and Mike Webster.
At the completion of that draft, I was in the room with Al Davis, John Madden, Ron Wolf and Tom Flores among others in discussions on who had the best draft. We liked who we got which included future Hall of Fame tightend Dave Casper and solid offensive lineman Henry Lawrence. But even that bevy of NFL brains didn’t pick out the Steelers picks as exceptional as they came to be.
So, in the weeks to come, after the selections are done you will hear from friends and see in the media who did well and who flunked in the draft. With enough chutzpah to actually grade teams with letters that reduce NFL scouting departments to a level equal with kids in elementary school.
I suggest the proof of the 2025 NFL draft won’t show its true colors for years to come. Of course it won’t, this is football, and everything is about the future.