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Peter King predicts NFL could do away with draft 'in our lifetime'
Longtime NFL insider Peter King predicted the league could do away with its draft "in our lifetime" and allow rookies to choose their teams.
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Peter King predicts NFL could do away with draft ‘in our lifetime’
Perhaps the biggest difference between American sports compared with rival countries is that leagues like the NFL take on young talent through a draft. Whether you’re talking about Brazilian soccer or French basketball, the academy system outside of the U.S. recruits young athletes to join clubs from a young age and pays them for their services. Longtime Sports Illustrated and NBC Sports NFL insider Peter King believes that before long, the NFL could follow suit.In a recent appearance on Pro Football Talk at his old network, King declared that “in our lifetime,” players will jump from the SEC or Big 10 into the NFL through a form of free agency rather than an amateur draft.
“At some point, I believe in our lifetime, there’s not going to be a draft,” King said this week. “And college football players will be able to look at the landscape of 32 teams and say, ‘I’d like to go here, I’d like to go there,’ wherever it is.”
Of course, beyond the ramifications for the competitive balance and parity that the league loves so much, it would be a big business hit for the NFL to lose its draft. The event is a well-attended spectacle that has generated a bidding war for its television rights this year.
If the draft was deemed to be a violation of labor laws, the NFL may not have a choice to save its April extravaganza. Still, King believes the league would have no issue creating a replacement event. After all, NFL and NBA free agency are big sports moments — as are college football and basketball signing days.
“The fact is … the NFL has invented events over the years that have become gigantic,” King explained. “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 in 2054, there’s no draft, let’s just say. 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?'”
Beyond his joking suggestion for Arch Manning to be a future commissioner of the league, Peter King imagined a single-site, televised selection show where recent Alabama or Oregon grads choose their pro teams.
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“The best players, when they come out of college, why can’t there be an event that we’ll all sort of celebrate as the time that college players go and choose their team? A weekend in early May, or whatever it is,” King said. “All I’m saying is the NFL has proven that if the legal system intercedes, and who knows if it will or won’t, they’ll figure out a way to capitalize on it.”
With recent legal rulings allowing college athletes to profit off their name, image and likeness, and soon for athletic departments to pay them for their play, it would not come as a surprise if an enterprising lawyer tested the legality of the draft before long.
King’s timeline of the next 20-30 years seems more than reasonable for the college-to-pro pipeline to fall away in the NFL and beyond.
