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With this year’s NFL Draft taking place virtually, the league elected to host a mock draft on Monday to make sure things run smoothly when the actual draft begins on Thursday.
A virtual draft sounds pretty simple on the surface. After all, we’re talking about millionaire general managers, coaches, and other front office staff simply joining some form of a conference call.
Well, it actually turns out that holding a conference call with all 32 teams in the league is actually difficult because they suffered technical issues before the Bengals could even make their fake first overall pick.
Text from a participant on the NFL’s mock draft that started at 1 pm EST. “Mock draft today already technical glitch w Cincinnatis 1st pick!!! Brutal.”
— Adam Schefter (@AdamSchefter) April 20, 2020
A technical issue is one thing, you can pin that on the IT professionals that planned out the call or maybe even the host system the league is using.
Having said that, general managers do have to play their part and realize the most important button on the phone during any conference call is the mute button. Apparently, a lot of GM’s around the league don’t even know that the mute button exists and they all started chatting about everything all at once.
Just last week Bill Belichick was bragging about the fact that he was ‘learning what new buttons do each day‘ so none of this should be that surprising.
Text from a GM during this mock draft “there are early communication issues because 32 of us GMs are on conference call and we didn’t hit mute. Sounds awful”
— Dianna Russini (@DMRussini) April 20, 2020
I’m texting with multiple coaches and GM’s who are on this mock draft call and everybody is saying the same thing which is band width is a problem. There are many communication issues.
— Dianna Russini (@DMRussini) April 20, 2020
Honestly, a team forgetting to hit the mute button during the actual NFL Draft later this week and accidentally leaking information about the pick they’re about to make would make television gold. I’d also set the over/under of curse words heard during the broadcast at 20.
It would honestly be shocking to see this week’s draft run smoothly, but we’ll see how things go down starting Thursday night.