Do you understand the NFL draft?

The BBC.

The national broadcaster of the UK. If you want to watch any channel at all you have to pay them money to do so. They do a lot of things right in their coverage of sport.
Their Sports Editor is Mihir Bose. He has a blog. I'm afraid to say he wrote something about the NFL draft. It is from the end of April but worth a look anyway.

American sports have always been a foreign country to me, so much so that whenever I visit the United States I am forced to change my newspaper reading habits. I grew up reading papers from the back, but when I go to the USA I start reading them from page one as most of the sports they report on make little sense to me.

1. Yes America is a foreign country
2. You will never learn anything new with that attitude
3. You are the sports editor of the BBC for fuck's sake at least pretend you know something about US sports

In that above paragraph Bose links to an International Herald Tribune wrap of a Yankees v Indians game. I'm guessing he never got past the title 'Wang helps Yanks' before giving up on this one.

The insularity of US sports reporting does not help either.

Completely unscientifically I have just checked out the BBC Sport homepage top 20 stories. 15 are based entirely on British sports. 8 are British football related despite the fact the season is over already.
Yes US sports reporters focus on *gasp* US sport. I don't doubt that it is much worse than other countries but the BBC are the pot calling the kettle black here I'm afraid.

The NFL has always been that American curiosity where, in the land of the free market, the biggest sport is an advertisement for red-blooded socialism.

Links in this one sentence to Milton Friedman and Tony Benn. Wow Mihir you're so clever and you know so much about politics I'm glad the BBC have employed you as their... oh wait Sports Editor. Then WTF is the point of this? Alienate anyone who knows enough about sport to realise you are talking shit?
It may have worked for some but not for me.

It is a compelling event, both very visible and open to scrutiny, and, in many ways, the NFL draft mirrors the way Americans run their primary elections campaigns, of which there is no equivalent in our Westminster model.

Seriously now is this a sporting blog or a political blog? Make up your mind what you want to be.

In what way does the NFL draft have anything to do with Presidential primaries?
Oh yeah I remember when Mario Williams successfully won more delegates than Vince Young or Reggie Bush in the 2006 draft. That was a classic.

In contrast, transfers in English football come across as cloak and dagger operations.

This is the non-cloak and dagger NFL draft where it is completely possible to speak to a player before drafting him to find out if he wants to play for you. Where the players come from a college system rife with bungs and added incentives to players to take up certain agents or attend certain schools.
Same in all US sports really.
Never seen Blue Chips?

Anyway now to my favourite bit:

The draft, which this year saw 252 college players signed by the 32 NFL teams, is also marked by what Americans call "trades".

Way to insult the license fee payer's intelligence. High five! What are these magical "trades" of which you speak?

a team will sometimes trade its number with another so it can sign a player it wants. Such trades only surface as the draft unfolds live on television, often providing the element of surprise and heightening the drama.

And that is Bose's comprehensive explaination of the trade system. No mention of value in picks traded whatsoever.
Can you imagine Bill Parcells deciding he needs a corner not a left tackle so trades the number 1 overall for the number 16 and takes Dominique Rodgers-Cromartie instead?
Not even Isiah Thomas is that stupid.

The annoying thing is that this year the BBC televised the SuperBowl live and did a pretty decent job, especially with their employment of Mike Carlson as analyst. But their sports editor needs to start reading those pesky back pages of USA today. Or better still some Peter Gammons or Gene Wojciechowski or Bill Simmons or something.