On The Clock opens
with a chapter on the 2014 NFL Draft, which the authors call 'the
most exciting of all time'. So exciting, in fact, they never even
mention who the second player selected in the draft might have been.
Instead, we jump from first pick Jadeveon Clowney to draft-dropping
Johnny Manziel to draft free-falling Michael Sam, in what is a
perfect metaphor for what makes something exciting to today's media
world, and what makes this book disappointing.
Clowney was the
story because he was a defensive lineman who'd seemed to take his
final year of college off. Manziel was a wild-card both on and off
the field, the antithesis of the classic great NFL quarterback. And
Sam, of course, had come out as gay, and was drafted by his local
team, the Rams, only a few picks before the final round came to an
end.
These were the
stories which drove the media frenzy around the draft, a frenzy
amplified by the NFL's decisions to stretch the seven rounds over
three days, putting the first day on prime time television, and
holding the whole thing later than usual, to add to the build-up's
hype. These brought more attention, but it's a value judgement the
authors never prove that this was what made the draft more
'exciting'. Indeed, the face they ignore Greg Robinson's going to the
Rams with the second pick implies there was little excitement to the
part of the process that should generate the most excitement: the
battle to be the first pick overall.
It's typical of the
book's approach. Although it's billed as 'the story of the NFL draft'
it's actually no such thing. In fact, the authors go into the war
room of the Cincinnati Bengals for the 2014 draft, and come out with
a few paragraphs that not only tell you nothing about their internal
processes or debates, but slide through in a couple of lines what was
a very good draft indeed. If you're a newcomer to the event, you
won't find it explained, or analysed. If you're familiar with it, you
won't find very much that's new. It seems to assume you know already
an awful lot of what they are telling you. Which is a shame, because
where the book is best is on history.
The chapter on Bert
Bell, the NFL commissioner who brought the draft into being, is
interesting. But it's a chapter about Bell, who's a great story, and
his influence on the NFL but not about the draft per se. It also
suffers from sloppy writing: in the space of a few pages we are told
three separate times that Bell 'came from a wealthy family'. His
family story is fascinating enough to be written with less repetition
and more clarity.
That's a problem
throughout the book, which seems to be an amalgam of separate
articles, some of them conceived in click-bait terms (one chapter is
'A Draft Genius and Three Wise Men' another is 'The Lists') which
allows for anecdotal story-telling but fails to fit into any
meaningful schematic about the draft itself. And as suggested above,
there is a distinct absence of copy-editing, as well as structural
editing.
Some of the
story-telling is interesting, but irrelevant to the draft (the Frank
Filchock scandal, for example) and some that is relevant ('the
African American Breakthrough', for example) needs to be either
examined more deeply, as NFL history, or linked more closely to the
draft process itself.
In the end, there
are plenty of stories to keep you entertained, if you don't mind the
scatter-shot nature of the writing and the structuring. But as a
history of the draft, it falls short. As insight into the processes
of the draft, of the teams when they are actually 'on the clock' it's
lacking. In fairness, most books are; Michael Holley's The War Room
had great access to the Patriots, and offered insight into
personalities, but never could crack the insider dynamic of what goes
on, and how it happens. That book remains to be written.
On The Clock: The
Story of the NFL Draft
by Barry Wilner and
Ken Rappoport
Taylor Trade
Publishing £12.99 ISBN 9781630761011
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