Mel Kiper Jr. has outlasted every critic who said the NFL Draft didn’t matter

Mel Kiper Jr. has been covering the NFL Draft for over 40 years. Long enough to watch almost everyone who said he was wasting his time either come around or go quiet.

A 2014 Bleacher Report profile caught him saying something that clearly resonated: that he believed this country runs on wanting to take people down, and that he felt like a target. On a recent appearance on The Press Box with Bryan Curtis and Joel Anderson, with the Pittsburgh draft two weeks out, Joel Anderson brought that quote back to him and asked if he still felt that way.

“Well, back in those days, remember everybody was hating on the draft,” Kiper said. “It wasn’t just me, it was basically anybody that covers the draft was getting hated on over the evaluations of the draft, the write-ups on the draft, the articles about the draft — anything pertaining to that was like, why are you doing this? Nobody cares. And I kept saying people do care. I never understood the negativity, and then it came toward me because I was doing this, and I was the analyst.”

Kiper said on The Press Box that the way he dealt with all of it, from the Tony Kornheiser columns to the scathing early criticism to the later controversies, was by refusing to read any of it. Not just the attacks. Everything.

That discipline — and it is a discipline, not indifference — is probably what allowed him to keep going during the years when the institutional headwinds were strongest. He was building something without a safety net, spending years grinding through publications, radio appearances, and tape sessions without any guarantee of financial return, relying almost entirely on his father’s belief in the project and his own certainty that the draft mattered more than the people dismissing it were willing to admit. Reading the takedowns carefully and taking them to heart would have been genuinely dangerous. So he didn’t.

What changed wasn’t Kiper. It was the world around him. The critics either reversed course quietly or stopped writing altogether, and Kiper believes he knows why. At some point, writing a dismissive piece about the NFL Draft or the people who cover it started to make the writer look like an “idiot” rather than discerning, because the evidence had accumulated to the point where dismissiveness was simply indefensible.

“Now we get thousands of people on the internet putting out mock drafts, evaluating players,” Kiper said. “I love that because it shows that something I believed in when nobody else did, now everybody loves it, and there are no haters. How can you criticize this process or anybody that’s doing this? And then the internet started, and everybody’s got mock drafts. The haters saw — if I write this, I’m gonna look like an idiot. So they either went away or just started to cover the draft, because everybody loves it.”

That doesn’t mean Kiper has been immune to criticism in the years since the draft became a cultural institution. If anything, the platform the draft’s growth provided him has occasionally made the criticism louder, because more people are watching. Last year in Green Bay, his sustained and increasingly emotional defense of Shedeur Sanders — who Kiper had ranked fifth overall and who fell to the fifth round — generated the familiar pile-on, the same calls for his job that have cycled through social media every few years since the internet gave everyone a platform to have an opinion about his opinions.

Kiper has said repeatedly that if he had paid attention to what was being written about him in the early years, he would have walked away. So he built a wall and stayed behind it, and on the other side of that wall the draft became one of the most watched events in American sports, the critics who called it a waste of time either got quiet or got on board, and Kiper kept showing up every April, for his 43rd consecutive draft in two weeks in Pittsburgh, exactly as certain about all of it as he was in 1984.