Ten years ago, tackle Joe Thomas opted not to attend the draft. He recently explained that he didn’t want to be an unpaid actor in the NFL’s top offseason drama.
“The idea of going to New York for five days and kinda being paraded around by the NFL as they make money off your every step, and the whole purpose is just for publicity for me to stand there in a suit and go, ‘Look at me everybody!’… That sounds horrible,” Thomas tells Graham Bentsinger in a new interview that debuts this weekend.
It also sounded horrible to the NFL that Thomas didn’t want to go along with the thing that is constantly sold to players as some sort of an honor.
“It started turning into, ‘The teams are gonna think you’re a prima donna and they’re not gonna wanna draft you anymore because you’re shunning the draft’ . . . to try to coerce me into showing up to the draft,” Thomas said. “And I really thank my agent, Peter Schaffer, for just being real upfront about it and saying, ‘Look, these guys are just BS-ing you. They’re just doing what they can to try to get you there, because they need the actors for their TV show.’ . . . And they get all these players to show up for free and they become part of the soap opera of the NFL, which is great for some guys. . . . But then there’s the guy that just plummets in the draft and he’s there sweating it out. He’s got five cameras in his face.”
Joe gets it, as he usually does. The whole process is packaged and sold to the players as a privilege, with no one from the league’s perspective ever admitting that having the players participate makes a show about nothing possibly about something. The draft doesn’t need to have a stage; it doesn’t even need to have a gathering. Everything can happen electronically, with no boos or no bear hugs and no parade of young men in fancy suits who are providing free content for the Ultimate Reality Show’s ultimate reality show and ultimately getting no compensation for it.
That doesn’t mean I’m not excited for the draft. But it does mean that every player who will be marching out to greet the Commissioner should be getting paid to be there. The Commissioner, and everyone else attending the draft on behalf of the league or one of its teams, definitely is.