ESPN's polls are still open

This is insane.

ESPN is now accepting votes on what you, the fan, think your favorite team should do in the upcoming NFL draft. Hang on, that’s not entirely accurate. Actually, what they’re asking for is which position your team should draft for, or whether they should take the best player available.

For example, if you click right now on the Broncos’ 15th pick, you get a pop-up asking, “Which area should the Broncos focus on with the 22nd pick in the first round?” That’s not my typo-the Broncos have not one but TWO first-round selections, and apparently this rare occurrence has overwhelmed the servers at ESPN.com and led to massive confusion.

Anyway, the choices are: defensive tackle, guard/center, running back, tight end, wide receiver, or of course the best player available. I really like the choice of “guard/center”. If I made the poll, I would have managed to insult you simpletons even further and asked,

“Which area should the Broncos focus on with the 22nd pick in the first round? (You know, the one right after No. 14):

1) Fat fellow
2) Guy who runs with ball
3) Best player available”

What is with the polling in sports anyway? I am all for fans voicing their opinions (obviously), but why does anyone want to share them with a TV network that’s just going to pass it off as news? (I didn’t vote in this poll and hope none of you did, but if you did, at least voting on the Internet during the day beats rushing to your computer during a game, which in turns beats sending in a text message during a game just for the privilege of getting a ballot.)

Pretty weak stuff. Apparently creativity and effort fall just behind journalistic ethics in the ESPN hierarchy. Just think how many times I could have voted if, say, the Raiders had had more realistic strategic options, like, “Rank draftees by number of felony convictions” or “Exhume Al Davis, he’ll know what to do.”

More to the point, I am a little concerned. I do not like the direction the NFL is heading with overexposure. As jmgore pointed out in the comments the other day, the NFL is so awesome precisely because the games are, by comparison to other sports, so rare. That keeps the play so intense. In contrast, there are eighty-two games in an NBA season, which is a little more than five years of an NFL player’s career. (And the average NFL player doesn’t last five years.)

Think about it this way: eighty-two of their regular season games ago, the New England Patriots had not only never won a Super Bowl in their franchise’s history, but had yet to start a game with Tom Brady at the helm. (Don’t even get me started on baseball-162 Broncos games ago, John Elway couldn’t win the big one.)

Different sports have different strengths-baseball should have a much longer season than football-and while no one’s suggesting lengthening the NFL season, I think it’s nice to have an offseason once in a while. That’s the main reason I haven’t taken the Broncos to task for a string of uh, creative offseason moves.

For this specific example, the blame lays solely on ESPN. But the NFL has a television network now, stars in one of the best-selling videogames, and stays just active enough to be in the public mind year-round-and I’m beginning to wonder if the games will always live up to the hype.

The NBA couldn’t have been more popular among young people in the early 90’s-at least with the ones I knew-but before they knew it, shoving Penny Hardaway and Grant Hill down fans’ throats got old. I just hope the NFL doesn’t make the same mistake.