Adam Schefter went on a brief, but tasty NFL rant last night on ESPN with Scott Van Pelt.

The crux of the beef here is that he doesn’t think the league is doing the right thing by attempting to proceed with business as usual in the middle of a global pandemic.

Volume up:

I’m not really sure what’s going on here. Some of the stuff he’s saying is contradictory to what he’s previously stated.

First of all, the “carnage in the streets” line doesn’t really help anybody. Is there “carnage” taking place in your neighborhood right now? No, of course not. Nobody is looting or rioting or coming to steal your toilet paper. Hyperbole can sometimes serve as a positive mechanism in terms of getting people to take something seriously, but if you go too far you risk scaring the shit out of people for no real reason, or folks might simply roll their eyes.

Roger Goodell is working out of the Dana White playbook. There’s an opportunity to be the top dog here while also giving sports fans something to look forward to during a difficult time. Proceeding with the NFL Draft is a great morale booster and gives us something to focus on this month (not to mention supporting sports media with badly-needed content). Goodell is essentially saying, “we’re not going to let the Coronavirus slow us down,” and that’s fine when it comes to the draft, which is a glorified conference call anyway. They can successfully execute that in a safe and responsible way.

That’s not the same for minicamp and OTAs, which of course could be cancelled, but saying that now, months ahead of time, serves…. what purpose exactly? Let the NFL make that determination when the time comes, instead of shitting further on fans who are already a little bit depressed. We’ve got to look out for our mental health here, and when Schefty comes out and says stuff like this, or when Kirk Herbstreit comes out talking about college football possibly not having a season, they are only shoveling more shit onto an already-struggling sports community.

Even last week, seven days ago, Schefter was on 97.5 the Fanatic talking about making the draft a seven-night event:

I’ve begun to campaign for this idea and continue to campaign for this idea, but in a year where there’s no other sports, where there’s no rush to get these teams out of the war rooms and onto the field for rookie minicamps, why not have one round of the draft every day, for seven straight days?

While you are having teams in their apartments, their homes, teleconferencing in, so that when they’re on the clock, they may be in their homes drafting, something like that, it’s complex. Teams may need more time on the clock to execute trades when there’s big deals going on, so why not give every team more time on the clock? Why not make the first day the first round, the second day the second round, the third day the third round, so on and so forth? Go seven straight nights, sort of like the Hanukkah of NFL drafts.

He was also leery of proceeding with free agency, which has been a HUGE BOON to sports fans and sports media during the past few weeks. NFL talk has dominated headlines and is, quite frankly, keeping people employed.

My take:

There’s a Coronavirus line to walk here and a lot of people are crossing that in an effort to try to scare people straight, which isn’t always an effective strategy.