Sportsnaut
The NFL Draft is one of the biggest spectacles in sports, drawing crowds in the hundreds of thousands to see who their favorite teams will pick and where top prospects will land. It’s become a three-day event watched by tens of millions on television. But one prominent NFL insider believes the draft will become a thing of the past “in our lifetime.”
“At some point, I believe in our lifetime, that there’s not going to be a draft,” Peter King told Pro Football Talk’s Mike Florio. “And college football players will be able to look at the landscape of 32 teams and be able to say, ‘I’d like to go here, I’d like to go there,’ wherever it is.”
King predicted that if the draft ceases to exist due to legal issues, the NFL could turn it into a massive free agency event for college prospects.
“The NFL has invented events over the years that have become gigantic,” stated King, noting how the NFL turned the Scouting Combine into a major event.
When he first covered the combine in 2000, King said he was one of a handful of people covering it. Now, there are about 1,200 media members with live coverage on the NFL Network and ESPN.
King believes the NFL could easily replace the draft with a college free agency extravaganza.
“Whatever the NFL wants to do, it can do. And if some judge one day says the draft is unconstitutional or whatever, and somebody abolished the draft and it goes through the courts and does this and in 2054, there’s no draft, let’s just say,” explained King. “The NFL, at that time, with ‘Commissioner Arch Manning’ will basically say at that time, ‘OK, there’s no draft? What event can we figure out? Let’s have a college prospect picking contest to see where they’re going to go, and who are they going to play for?'”
King added: “All I’m saying is the NFL has proven that if the legal system intercedes, and who knows whether it will or won’t, they’ll figure out a way to capitalize on it.”
The draft creates drama, as we saw last month with Shedeur Sanders, but a college free agency event could be equally entertaining. Whether that happens remains decades away, if ever.
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