Mike Florio has some absurd views on the NFL draft.
Florio is one of the most famous pundits in the NFL world, and he’s built a huge following with ProFootballTalk. Yet, for a man who has made a name because of the NFL, he doesn’t have great views of the draft. (RELATED: David Hookstead Is The True King In The North When It Comes To College Football)
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The PFT founder wrote the following in his book “Playmakers: How the NFL Really Works (And Doesn’t),” according to Outkick:
The draft reflects Anti-American values. It restrains movement and flexibility and the inherent realities of self-determination. It forces men not long removed from being boys to move to places they otherwise would never choose to live, often hundreds if not thousands of miles from the places they’d prefer to start their professional lives.
What’s stunning about this claim from Florio is that he later doubled down during an interview with Awful Announcing when he told the publication, “It really is un-American. There is no industry other than professional sports where someone who enters a workforce cannot pick where they are going to live, cannot pick who they’re going to work for, cannot pick who they’re going to work with. They just have to submit. The players are brainwashed. The fans are brainwashed. We just accept that’s the way it is. You can’t push back against it. Well, you can. They just don’t do it often enough.”
Yeah, that’s right, folks! Earning millions of dollars to play a sport is “anti-American” and “un-American.”
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I’ve heard some whacked out takes about sports over the years, and this is among the craziest. The NFL draft is anti-American? Yeah, that’s a hard pass from me.
Nobody forces anyone to enter the draft. Football stars could easily choose a different career path, but if they want to play in the NFL, you abide by the system in place.
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The entire point of the draft is to make sure there is parity in the league. If teams could just target any college player, it would be the Wild West and a complete disaster.
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The worst teams pick early in hopes they can bolster their rosters and the best teams pick later to, again, attempt to make sure there’s parity. The NFL doesn’t want teams to be awful forever.
The NFL wants all teams to be competitive, and the draft is one of the ways the league gets it done. Furthermore, football isn’t a sport with a lot of choice.
Not everyone who wants to play for Alabama can. Is it anti-American that Nick Saban doesn’t make an offer to every kid out there? Of course not.
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Florio is a smart guy, even if I do often disagree with him, and he should be smart enough to know this take is complete nonsense.