In the grand theater of the upcoming NFL draft, as exhaustively covered a meat market as exists anywhere in the sporting world, individual combine performances can dramatically alter the monetary value of a young athlete’s career. Take Ricky Pearsall, for instance, a senior wide receiver from Florida. His performance at the combine turned heads and shifted narratives.
Pearsall has long been a nightmare for defenders in the slot, even if his college statistics were somewhat underwhelming. His polished route-running, combined with explosive stop-start quickness, allows him to win one-on-one matchups with ease, turning defenders into mere spectators of his prowess. However, before the combine, some may have viewed him as a luxury pick, a potential backup wide receiver.
Until, that is, Pearsall put on a numbered bib, laced up his running shoes, and proceeded to earn himself millions. Clocking in at a 4.41-second 40-yard dash and boasting a 42-inch vertical jump, the third-best among wide receivers at the combine, Pearsall’s athleticism was undeniable. His combine performance didn’t just elevate his draft stock. It transformed him into a coveted commodity, a “steal” for any team looking to bolster its receiving corps.
This spectacle of young talent being measured, analyzed, and commodified is at the heart of the NFL draft’s allure. It is a moment in which athleticism and potential are quantified, in which a player’s worth is distilled into numbers, rankings, and what one long-ago scout called “dollar signs on the muscle.” The draft, with its endless stream of content, scouting reports, and player ratings, overshadows many real sporting contests between March and April. Fans, taking on the role of armchair general managers, delve into the minutiae of each prospect, debating who will be the most cost-effective savior of their beloved team.
Herein lies a more complex reality. The draft serves as a mirror reflecting the best and worst of capitalism in professional sports, the packaged securitization of athletics, a numbers-obsessed meritocracy in which young men are scrutinized in ways that border on the dehumanizing. Descriptions on the NFL draft website can venture into uncomfortably personal territory. Such a description, for instance, might detail a player’s “broad chest, thick hips, and meaty hands,” “exceptional high calves and long thighs,” or his “low rear end and gorgeous acceleration off the block,” applying marketing language and market values to what once might have been described in terms of transcendent physical prowess.
Descriptions lauding a player’s “plus body” or “huge hands and feet” not only serve to objectify but, more importantly, to commodify, making the player’s physical attributes the primary focus of their value proposition. This relentless focus on physicality effectively dehumanizes the athletes, shifting the narrative from their skills, work ethic, and on-field intelligence, factors usually reduced to a single marginal unit of analysis labeled “intangibles,” to an assessment reminiscent of livestock auctions rather than evaluations of professional talent.
This relentless, cash-on-the-barrelhead analysis is accompanied by a host of numerical grades for all sorts of physical and mental attributes. The process is oddly akin to the scouting of potential supermodels or the casting for a big-budget porn film, positioning these young men at the intersection of opportunity and exploitation. Along the way, hundreds of thousands of draft-obsessed sports fans become enthusiastically complicit in this money-saturated process.
The NFL draft’s exhaustive coverage reflects a culture that places its highest value on the process of valuation itself, in which the physical measurements of young athletes become fodder for endless return-on-investment analysis. Of course, this phenomenon extends beyond the draft itself. Fantasy sports enthusiasts and video gamers lost in their Madden and NBA 2K franchises become engrossed in the minutiae of salaries, contracts, and the cold calculus of “cutting dead weight,” aligning their interests more closely with the financial imperatives of team ownership than with the near-miraculous athleticism or the well-being of the players themselves. This alignment with capital interests reflects a culture in which shareholder value trumps other considerations, such as the aesthetic pleasure of watching generational talents utilize their skills or the communal spirit of local sporting rivalries.
The culture surrounding the draft and fantasy sports creates a vast gulf between fans and the athletes they purportedly support. Instead of identifying with the players or appreciating the nuances of their talents — far more common in the age of local sandlot teams with broad civic participation — many fans now view athletes through the lens of asset management. The transformation of fans from localists rooting for “our boys” into armchair general managers aligns fan loyalties with those of billionaire owners and corporate entities over star athletes.
Amid this value-maximizing nonsense, it pays to recall the words of the legendary Detroit Lions defensive tackle Alex Karras. When talking with writer George Plimpton in the book Mad Ducks and Bears (1973), Karras explained that what mattered most to him in sports wasn’t money but getting a close-up view of other superlative athletes: “The best part for me was the thrill I got seeing what great football players can do physically — to see what they really can do. It’s breath-taking to see Jim Brown do things that the normal player can’t. That’s why the Pro Bowl game means so much to football players: we get to see the sort of company we keep.”
To Karras, these moments offered a chance to appreciate the talent of his peers, a reminder of the human element that underlies all these performances. Rather than making our fandom as much about budgets and charts as it has often become these days, we regular old sports fans, too, should pause to marvel at what such human beings are capable of doing — and what, in turn, they can inspire us to do with ourselves.
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Oliver Bateman is a journalist, historian, and co-host of the What’s Left? podcast. Visit his website: www.oliverbateman.com.