O’Donnell: NFL will add spring to its list of American sports conquests
ONCE UPON A TIME IN AMERICA, the grand trifecta of a classic sports spring was Major League Baseball's Opening Day, the Masters and the Kentucky Derby.
The public said so. TV viewership agreed. Many memorable vivid color covers of Sports Illustrated made it official.
No more.
The new kid on the block is hardly new and certainly isn't just one kid.
It's 32 of them.
That would be the first round of the NFL draft.
AS ENERGY IN GREEN BAY PROVED last week and subsequent Nielsen numbers confirmed, pro football's annual personnel match night is on a roll to be the biggest of them all.
It's estimated that more than 250,000 people made the trek to Green Bay to attend some portion of the three-day festivities. Close to 13.6 million watched Thursday's first round.
That's more than the 12.7M that waited on CBS for the conclusion of Rory McIlroy's sudden-death win over Justin Rose at Augusta three weeks ago.
SATURDAY'S DERBY ON NBC — especially the quarter hour around the actual running of the 151st Run for the Roses — will undoubtedly tab out between 16 million and 20 million sets of eyeballs when figures are released Monday.
As for MLB, forget about it. The game blew up the compelling structure of its own April overture years ago and has never recovered.
Rather than a President of the United States throwing out the first ball in Washington and the Cincinnati Reds opening the National League season as the senior circuit's oldest organization, the day was allowed to degenerate into a flabby and increasingly inconspicuous leak in.
THE APPEAL OF THE NFL DRAFT is replete with so many tangents that its future rise to primacy seems inevitable.
Diehards start getting sweaty palms the morning after the Super Bowl. The event knows no age boundaries. Fantasy players start drawing and redrawing their own personal roster projections as the picks come tumbling in.
Wagering on the draft is still in a relatively embryonic stage. But that'll change. Sports gaming imagineers are limited only by their underestimating the NFL chase fever of the mainstream.
MLB OPENING DAY — kaput. Masters, too may visions of southern-fried Ted Baxters in “Caddyshack” duds. The Kentucky Derby — steady interest, although stock prices of Churchill Downs Inc. have been in free fall for weeks.
And the NFL draft?
Prepare the new spring throne.
The golden bling of 32 fresh faces every five minutes on an April eve is going nowhere but up.
STREET-BEATIN':
Another NFL tote board evolving — which franchise will be the first to have a new stadium up and humming? Fresh home-brewed odds: Commanders (2-5), Browns (6-5), Bears (3-1). (And a strong case can be made that George McCaskey and his delay crew face the path of least civic opposition if only they'd release a cogent master plan and commit to building at Arlington Park.) …
Apparently common NFL knowledge that Jim Harbaugh and the Chargers were trying to finesse position to draft Colston Loveland last week. Instead, the Bears got him. Harbaugh initially met Loveland two nights after Michigan beat Iowa for the 2021 Big Ten title in Indy. The driven coach and son Jay Harbaugh somehow made it to Bliss, Idaho, and 25 months later, the Wolverines were national champs. First bonding snack, according to Loveland, was salami and crackers. …
Kindest word to describe Marquee Sports Network's live handling of that frightening fan tumble over the 21-foot-high Clemente Wall at Pittsburgh on Wednesday night would be “timid.” If announcers Alex Cohen and Jim Deshaies had been covering JFK in Dallas, reporting would have stopped with, “Something has happened in the motorcade.” Hold all video, but viewers deserved to know exactly what was happening. …
Mike Repole is the Queens (NYC) bootstrapper who made a ton of cabbage with Vitaminwater. He has thrown some of it back at thoroughbred racing ownership and Rick Pitino's men's basketball program at St. John's. Humility is not a lead part of his package, as Repole shows in the fresh-run Netflix six-parter “Race For The Crown.” So it was no surprise when his Grande was scratched out of the Derby Friday. (The Kentucky racing gods demand deference.) …
The 60th anniversary of St. Viator's remarkable runner-up finish in the 1965 IHSA baseball tournament will be celebrated as part of a Lions' doubleheader vs. visiting Marian Catholic next Saturday. Coach Len Sparacino rode the arms of sophomore whiz kids Bob Stevens and Jerry Donahue to the finale, where they lost to the brilliant Al Smith and Peoria Manual 4-2. Brand spanking new, St. Viator was just about to graduate its first four-year class. …
And Dan Patrick, on Cleveland finally getting Shedeur Sanders out of NFL draft purgatory last week: “It was all so 'Brownsian.'”
Jim O'Donnell's Sports and Media column appears each week on Sunday and Wednesday. Reach him at jimodonnelldh@yahoo.com. All communications may be considered for publication.