NFL Draft will cap off another wild offseason

The NFL Draft begins on Thursday. It ends Saturday. Once that is over with, there will be OTAs and minicamps in the coming months. However for the general reality, football goes into hibernation.

Back in the prehistoric days, before the internet was a mainstream source of information and the God forsaken 24-7 news cycle didn’t exist, football was largely a sport played out from August through the Super Bowl. After that, you got the news on SportsCenter and maybe the sports section in your newspaper.

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Now? The Super Bowl ends and the offseason — which really needs a new name because there’s nothing off about it — kicks into high gear. Without a few weeks, the window for the franchise tag opens, and before it closes, we’re all descending upon Indianapolis for the NFL Scouting Combine. After that comes to a close, everybody settles in a week later for free agency to start. And no, not actual free agency, but the tampering period. Of course, the tampering period is only a few days long. Yet everybody is essentially signed by the end of it.

From there, it’s about a seven-week slog until we hit the draft. In the meantime, we are all drowning in mock drafts. Some try to be straight up, some try to be correct. Some include trades, others are off the wall. All of them are incredibly incorrect, and yet we consume them like oxygen anyway. Why? Because people love football, and because those people are bored.

Then, this week, the schedule dropped. We already knew the opponents for each team and the venue for each game, but now we know the order. Somehow, that was a huge deal, because it’s awesome to know what the road map to the Super Bowl looks like for your team.

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Now, we are one week away from the Arizona Cardinals being put on the clock. Enough about whether Kyler Murray will or won’t be playing in the desert. Enough about where Josh Rosen will be suiting up come Week 1. In seven days, general manager Steve Keim will have to make his call public for the world to see, and then the rest of the 250+ picks can be made in succession.

Unlike any other sport, the NFL has figured out how to turn itself into a 24-7-365 showcase, ranging from the schedule release to the draft, to franchise tags and free agency. With all due respect to the NBA, the NFL has long been, and will continue to be, the king at getting its fans whipped into a frenzy.