OK look, maybe I’m stating the obvious here, and I’m not trying to rip the otherwise hardworking reporters who covered this nothing burger– it’s their job. And the Eagles guys do it better than maybe any other team’s media. But when I joked about getting turned down for a credential for the draft because I didn’t cover the NFL the way the NFL wants you to cover the NFL, this sort of thing is what I was referring to. This is how the NFL wants you to cover them.

They want the media to be present and accounted for when a team calls a meaningless press conference, like the Eagles did today, to provide the masses with filler to keep interest piqued for the most overhyped sporting event on the calendar. They want you to dutifully question Howie Roseman and Joe Douglas about their thinking heading into draft day without even so much as a grammatical smirk at the fact that Roseman and Douglas have literally no incentive to say anything even remotely true or to tip their hand in any direction:

I’M SHOCKED they aren’t publicly ruling out positions! I would’ve thought for sure that Roseman and Douglas would’ve enlightened us all, killed their negotiating leverage in possible draft day trades, and told us that they are absolutely not taking [insert three positions] and focusing on [insert two others] in the first round. I can’t believe they didn’t do this! I mean, look at how fucking stupid this is:

Most press conferences are useless. This one – the week before the draft pow-wow with guys whose job it is to put up smoke screens – is downright doublespeak. You’d have a better chance of gleaning insight on Kim Jong-un’s thinking on North Korean state TV than you would listening to Roseman and Douglas today:

Ohhhhh boy, Joe, they bought it! They bought it! THEY ACTUALLY BOUGHT IT! We successfully toed the line on a piece of shit so we didn’t look like we were condoning his actions, but also maybe fooled a few teams into thinking that we’re crazy enough to draft a felonious abuser in 2017.

All this is – literally all this is – is a way for the NFL and the Eagles to keep up interest in the draft, fuel speculation, rumor and inneuendo based on vapid clichés and “reading between the lines” to stoke the caller boards at sports talk radio stations, fill the increasingly useless 15-minute regional sportscasts, and give a few columnists something to bat around in their daily, pointless missives. The media will happily transcribe the quotes and act like Howie said something fit to print, while sports talk radio generates two hours of conversation based off Joe Douglas’ head fake:

Me? I’ll stick by my informed rumor mongering that the Eagles could be looking at a defensive lineman.