Peter Schrager is begging you to stop spoiling the NFL Draft

There is a tradition at the NFL Draft that has nothing to do with Roger Goodell, nothing to do with the commissioner’s walk to the podium, and nothing to do with the slow, theatrical hug that follows. It predates the green rooms. It predates the team war rooms filling primetime television. It predates, frankly, almost everything that the league has constructed around the event to make it feel like more than it literally is, which is a room full of people making a business decision.

The tradition is Peter Schrager, every single April, asking you — pleading with you, really — to put your phone down.

“Put your phones away on draft day,” Schrager pleaded on the latest episode of his The Schrager Hour. “This is not the NFL talking to me, this is not ESPN trying to gussy up the ratings here. There is nothing more fun, and there is no greater reality show than the NFL Draft.”

When a team makes its selection, the pick is submitted to the league, which then distributes that name to all 32 war rooms before Roger Goodell has thought about adjusting his tie. It isn’t until roughly 90 seconds to two minutes after the league disseminates the information that the pick is announced on television.

“There is no valor in spoiling an NFL Draft pick,” Schrager claimed.

ESPN’s own Seth Markman said as much ahead of last year’s draft when he told The Athletic that tipping picks doesn’t require much skill — that it only takes one person in one of 32 buildings to send a text — and that the reporters doing it are not exactly Edward R. Murrow Award contenders for their trouble.

Markman’s view, and the NFL’s, has been consistent enough that the league has spent over a decade working with its broadcast partners to maintain a policy that asks reporters who cover the sport for a living to voluntarily sit on information they already have, because the belief is that the experience of not knowing is worth more to the person watching than whatever anyone gets out of reading it on a timeline first.

“Would you watch a reality show if three minutes before the end, they told you who was being eliminated? Schrager asked. “Would you watch a movie if three minutes before the final scene, they told you what happens?”

The NFL Draft, for all the ways the league has dressed it up over the years, is built on exactly that — suspense — and the argument from Peter Schrager is that the 90-second window between a pick being submitted and Goodell saying it out loud is the last place where any of it still lives. That window that used to be the whole point of watching.

There was a time when the NFL Draft was appointment television in the truest sense, when you cleared your Thursday night and ordered a pizza and sat in a room with people who cared about the same team you did, and nobody knew anything until they did, and the knowing arrived the same way for everyone at the same moment through the same television. The jingle that ESPN has been using since 2006 — those ten notes that Pavlov-trained an entire generation of football fans to sit up straight — actually meant something was coming rather than confirming something you had already read.

Goodell walked to the podium, and the room quieted, and you either got what you wanted or you didn’t, and either way, the moment was yours.

Peter Schrager is not naive enough to think Thursday night in Pittsburgh is going to be any different. He knows the picks will move from war rooms to phones to timelines the same way they always do, and that the reporters sending them are not going to stop because an ESPN analyst made a heartfelt case on his Omaha Productions show. What he is asking for is smaller than that, not for the industry to change, but for the person watching at home to make a choice about how they want to experience something that happens only once a year.

“Enjoy the show,” he said. “Be shocked once in a while. Be blown away — or disappointed — when your team takes the other guy.”