Considering the circumstances, I think ESPN did a fantastic job airing the NFL draft this weekend. The complexity of coordinating and producing a virtual draft in the middle of a global pandemic is a monolithic task, and every single person who worked on the technical side of the broadcast deserves an award.

The editorial side is another story. Those folks deserve a gargantuan lump of coal because of their decision to highlight personal and family tragedies.

We all understand what ESPN was trying to do. They were trying to illustrate the adversity these guys have had to overcome in order to see their NFL dreams fulfilled. There’s something “humanizing” about doing a feature story on John Doe out of Louisiana-Monroe, who lost his mother at age 12 but then went on to become an All-American and first round draft pick. Those stories make you want to cheer for that player and they always help to contextualize what we’re watching.

But didn’t it feel like too much to you? I swear there was a stretch of three or four picks where they started by talking about dead relatives, or this guy’s sister was in a boating accident, or his brother lost his arm to an alligator, or something along those lines. It became borderline depressing, and it did a disservice to these players by highlighting negatives instead of positives.

To that end, ESPN apologized for attaching this bullet point to a Tee Higgins graphic:

His mom fought drug addiction for 16 years.

Is that something you’d put on a “get to know” graphic?

ESPN’s apology, via The Washington Post:

The Higgins graphic “should not have aired,” ESPN vice president of production Seth Markman said in a statement emailed to The Washington Post on Sunday.

It was a mistake and we apologize for it,” he said. “We want our draft coverage to personalize players and, where appropriate, acknowledge the obstacles they’ve had to overcome on their journey to the NFL. This graphic lacked proper context.”

One of the things I think contributed to the backlash was the fact that people are already a little depressed from having to self-isolate during the pandemic. The collective mental health of the country is not very good right now. Folks are going to the hospital and dying from COVID-19. This draft was supposed to be a bright spot and something positive, like a ray of football sunshine to break through the clouds and provide a little bit of joy. Instead of contributing to that, ESPN decided to take an existing layer of doom and gloom and put five more layers of gloom on top of it, creating the world’s most dejecting cake.