Take a few deep, cleansing breaths

So, after months of speculation, countless mocks, gallons of petrochemicals sacrificed on the altar of Mel Kiper's hair and about 12 hours of the actual NFL Draft, what have we learned?

Not a damned thing.

Chances are, if your favorite team sucked Friday, it still sucks today. Or maybe they don't. Maybe they've picked up some unholy combination of Deacon Jones and Darryl Green who can run like the wind, bench press Cadillacs, eat iron and crap high-grade steel.

The fact is, nobody knows what, if anything, this weekend will mean for any team. Not yet, anyway. Any honest commentator will tell you a draft can't be judged for at least three years.

So all those "Grade the Draft" columns you're going to see this week? The insights of my cats are about as useful. You're better off downloading porn instead of worrying about what Peter King thinks about the draft.

Actually, that's probably always true. At least porn will get you off and King can't say that. (I hope. What kind of sick freaks are you people?)

Quiet as kept, most of the guys drafted this weekend will never be anything more than camp bodies who never get into an NFL stadium without a ticket. There is as much chance the highly-touted rookie you're so excited about will become an All-Pro as there is he'll become a bust so horrible his name is only mentioned as a cautionary tale or a sick joke.

So for those of you who think that first-rounder is just the guy to put your team over the top? Relax. He probably won't start this year and there is, at best, a 50-50 proposition he ever becomes a regular starter. Courtney Brown was once a can't-miss prospect.

For those of you who are convinced your team's entire front office is composed entirely of knuckle-dragging sub-morons who've doomed the franchise for years to come (i.e. Eagles fans every single year)? Relax. It's entirely possible that men who've watched so much college game tape in the past few months that they scream "Whoo, pig sooey" upon orgasm might know a bit more about football than you've been able to glean from the local sports radio meathead.

The draft is a crapshoot and the odds are terrible. Accept this now, and you'll live a much happier life.

Unless you're in Detroit. You should probably just become a hockey fan.

Your Anti-Draft Rant

It actually hurts me to not be able to watch this. I value my football knowledge; I read a lot about it, watch as much as I can, usually do pretty well in my roto pursuits. And yet, every year the draft comes around, and I feel like I'm watching a telethon for the Get A Life Foundation.

Here's the thing. When I'm watching a game, I can affect the outcome with the sheer power of my mind. You can, too, of course -- otherwise, why would we all yell at the television so much, or develop our bizarre little secret totem moves when the team needs a good outcome? Like you're the only person who has a special place to sit, or an activity that needs to be done to change the luck. And no, I'm not going to tell which of you need to stop watching the games entirely, because when you watch, they always lose. You know who you are.

But with the draft, no one has any clue which of these guys will be good, in many cases for years. You can pretend, of course, and make good sneering derisive comments based on the relative lack of intellect the organization has shown in the past. It wasn't going out on a limb for anyone, say, to bury the Dolphins for Ted Ginn Jr. last year; the first round is not the place for overrated college WRs with bad routes and bodies, unless, of course, you are Matt Millen. So all of those affect the event with your mind and attention things? Gone.

Plus, um, no actual ball being played, at a time when actual ball is being played. Important ball, even. People who only watch and like football are like people who only like and drink beer. I can admire your devotion, but when there's no beer left, I'm still getting drunk on wine and liquor, while you are waiting six months for another beer. Sucks to be you, guy. Why don't you drink some of this NBA wine or this MLB liquor?

But getting back to the NFL Draft Day viewing investment... if you root for a specific guy to be picked by your team, doesn't it even suck worse when he tanks?

Other teams have blown picks. Eagle Fans have Mike Mamula. The reason why he's so memorable? Because so many of us were excited about him back before we realized what a homeless man's Charles Haley he was. You think all of those jerseys were sold from game action or racism? Well, sure on the latter, but we don't get there without hearing about his freakish workouts.

Me, I never watched the draft. So I was able to turn on Mamula faster, without a hint of remorse. I also wasn't out the hours of draft day coverage, months of pre-training camp hope, or scratch for his cursed jersey. (And yes, yes, I know that he wasn't that bad, and that the Eagles have made much worse boneheaded first round picks; I remember Keith Allen and Bernard Williams, when the organization decided that the best way to use a first round picks were on rapists and pot smokers. Good times.)

Last point: I get why draft lovers are here. It's the only thing that's even tangentially related to football for six long months. You know what would fix that? A professional league, in this country, playing by the same rules, in the spring. But I've already written the USFL posts before, so click on that tag if you want to read how nostalgic and old I am....

Re(i)d Queen Effect

"It takes all the running you can do, to keep in the same place." -- Lewis Carroll, "(Alice) Through the Looking Glass"

Red Queen Effect comes from evolutionary genetics, and it uses the Lewis Carroll quote above to describe the phenomenon of maintenance in the face of an unrelenting enemy -- mostly about parasitic diseases versus the organism that host them.

In it, everything is done simply to maintain the status quo; even a positive mutation will simply gain you a leg up, as it were, for a small amount of time, before the parasite adapts as well. (In a fun aside, this also explains why, evolutionarily, we have sex and genders -- it's all to thwart parasites. Evolutionary geneticists are sexy, sexy beasts.)

If you are like me, as always, you have my apologies. But you've faced Red Queen Effect in the business end of a bench press, on a bicycle, at work and, in this off-season at least and most likely many more, in your football team. Especially if you are an Eagles fan.

Speculation around my part of the world and blogosphere has been fixated on who (or, since this is football and the pre-draft speculation makes us all combine-ish surveyors of meat, what) the Eagles will draft with the 19th pick.

Since the team has proven itself incapable of drafting a WR high since the Tragedy of Freddie Mitchell, despite the fact that, well, they seem to have good years when they have a plus wideout and bad years when they don't... well, let's just move on from that, shall we.

The only positions that we're (pretty sure) they won't draft are RB, QB, TE, PK and P. Everything else, given the stopgap nature of last year's frustrating 8-8 team, is up for grabs.

(Note: They'd certainly be welcome to draft a top-drawer TE, but after slapping the franchise tag on LJ Smith and being reasonably encouraged by Brent Celek last year, they won't. Besides, a top-drawer TE is too close to a WR for comfort. As the Owens Debacle proved, we just can't have them. Bad things happen.)

Offensive line is probably not likely, even though Job Runyon is getting old in the tooth, and the little that the world saw of Winston Justice made us all, Justice included, assume the fetal position. Some would note that putting a de facto rookie against the NFC's best DE in 2007 on an island in a MNF game was, um, Remarkably Stupid Coaching, too.

But it's not like the Reid Era to cut bait that quickly, and given Justice's pedigree (USC) and draft position (2nd round in 2006), he probably gets another year to show if he's learned anything. The team likes Jamal Jackson at center, and so do I; he's athletic and nasty. But even if he wasn't, drafting an interior lineman in the first round just isn't something they would do. You'd take a tackle and move him in if he couldn't handle the most meaningful role, kind of how they rarely draft a safety very high, preferring to go for the higher upside at corner.

On the defensive side of the ball, the CB class is said to be good, while the safeties are weak. Again, this plays right into the general school of thought anyway, which is you can always slide a slow corner to safety, but you can't do anything with a safety that's having trouble, other than cut him. Unfortunately, drafting at the 19 spot probably means reaching for a corner, so this isn't where they are going to go, either.

With the Eagles, linebacker is to the defense as wide receiver is to the offense -- an absolutely critical position that they just have a blind spot about. The perfect Eagles LB for the Reid Era is a guy that's good in coverage and... that's about it. It's one of the biggest problems of the regime, in that the fan base years (pines, really) for the next Seth Joyner, otherwise known as the linebacker from a little place called Rage. But the team winds up going for Big Thinkers like Dhani Jones and Mark Simoneau. It's maddening, but it is what it is.

So that leaves us with a defensive lineman, and specifically a defensive end, to replace the cursed Jevon Kearse and to buttress the team's best defensive player last year, Trent Cole. Now, the Giants showed that two plus pass rushers on the defensive line can do a lot of damage... but excuse me for just thinking that the draft pick, if and when it goes here, is just chasing the ineffecive free agent signings of Kearse and Darren Howard.

Meanwhile, of course, the secondary is a serious problem with the ghost of Brian Dawkins, the erratic play of Lito Sheppard, and nickel back Will James (nee Peterson) playing so badly that most Eagle fans were happier to see street meat like Joselio Hanson and JR Reed in coverage. (At least they seemed interested in hitting someone.) And that's where Re(i)d Queen Effect comes in, because if either the Howard or Kearse signings had worked out, you could spend this pick in the defensive backfield and addressed your most glaring need.

You know, that you can actually draft, given that only Pinkos and Hottentots draft or sign game-breaking wide receivers.

And with that, I think it's Drink Me Time...

Epic Drop: Top 10 Reasons You Do Not Need To Care About the NFL Draft

Your link is here, and reason number eleven is that it makes people who watch college football feel like they haven't wasted their lives. Screw those people.

If At First You Don't Succeed.... Stop Trying

My fantasy football league has its live draft a week from today. It’s a 14 team league in which I’ve participated the past 4 or 5 years. I’ve never made it into the playoff round. The problem is I’ve never been a huge NFL fan. I’ve been a fan of individual teams, but have never paid enough attention to what the rest of the league is doing. So I pretty much suck at fantasy football.

I’ve tried no draft prep in the past where I print off the live draft results from ESPN.com and work off of those. I’ve also tried putting in hours of prep time and coming up with a matrix sheet of picks depending on who goes in front of me. Neither seemed to work.

But this year, I have a new plan. I’m going to let a software program do all the work for me. A buddy of mine sent me this program that recommends who to pick in each round based on what you and the other owners have selected so far in the draft. I just took a run through on the product and it seems pretty cool. You can enter in your league's scoring system so it can calculate the best picks for you by round. Basically, each time a player is picked, you click that player’s name and it is off the board. The program has a name, but I’m calling it the Costanza 3000 based on the episode where George decides to quit life and just wear jogging suits every day.

I realize that this plan is rife with pitfalls. The biggest one being the idea of using a machine to make your picks. But I see the upside in this. When my team sucks again, I’ll just blame the software. This will also allow me to spend all my time during the draft questioning other people’s picks and bothering them while they are thinking about their next picks. Heckling is really what I do best anyway.

Another plus is I’m taking dorkdom to a new level. Let’s face it, fantasy sports participants are pretty much dorks. My wife tells me this 3 times a year when I tell her it’s draft night. And spreadsheets are so 2001. I love the guys who have pages and pages of sheets of data. If you don’t have a software program with you on draft day you’re really not trying. And that is my plan precisely.