Seemingly the moment I turned 18, I received a letter in the mail from the Selective Service. I was compelled, by law, to inscribe myself into serving the United States government, should such wartime or emergency warrant a presidential decree. This is a far cry from the annual NFL draft, where the best eligible football players are pooled to latch on with a professional franchise.

These figurative warriors aren’t exactly signing their name in blood, but continuing a playing career at the highest level of competition is as lucrative as it is fleeting. The average NFL playing career spans only two and a half years. Even if an athlete is drafted and makes at or around a million dollars per year, that is hardly life-changing money for someone in their early-20s, even if it seems that way to them at the time. This is also in lockstep tandem with the inherent risk of a myriad of potentially-debilitating injuries. Concussions leading to CTE, catastrophic ligament tears or bone fractures, and chronic arthritis can all manifest from an early-life devotion to a collision sport. The mega stars of the NFL are vaulted in front of the camera to flaunt the riches of the Shield, while the real gladiators toil in the trenches they dug themselves for pennies on the proverbial dollar.

When you tune into the three-day spectacle that is the NFL Draft this coming week, take note of how happiness and relief are equally painted across the faces of the players who are selected and their loved ones. They made it. It took years of sacrifice and bodily abuse to reach a payday. Some are going to lose their composure and cry, like DK Metcalf. He should be an indication of how difficult a climb it is to reach the pinnacle. DK is the son of an NFL player and still needed to overcome a mountain of hardship and scrutiny to work his way to the league. When he cried, I cried. His tears and shaky voice on the phone with Seahawks brass were as genuine as it gets. Nothing beats the feeling of an emotional weight lifted.

I’ll be glued to my sofa all three days. Yes, I love seeing the reactions from all seven rounds. I live for the back stories. It’s a soap opera for football fans. I get invested in dozens of players from tracking them through college and studying their tape to prepare for the next fantasy season. I love football, they love football, and the draft is both the beginning and the end of the story. It is downright fun to mute the TV to “cut off” Mel Kiper Jr or Todd McShay to offer my dissenting opinion and exclaim how much smarter than them I think I am. There will be times when I applaud a great pick and then choke on my popcorn laughing when a team inevitably soils themselves in their own stupidity (unless it was my Cowboys).

The NFL Draft is must-see entertainment for a person like me. Call us what you want, but there exists a horde of nerds who will be catching the same high in unison. It signals the end of talking season and the beginning of “landing spot season.” As we near the end of a global pandemic, I hope that we can laugh, cry, and argue like it’s 2019 again, with high fives, chest bumps, and bear hugs, while wearing faded, over-washed jerseys that only appear shrunk. Here’s to this being the last draft where we don’t have a buddy’s draught glass to clink in acknowledgement of a player or beer well-picked. Cheers!

I am an apologist; we all are. If I burn my signature dish and order takeout (happens more than you think), I try to justify the cost of restaurant food as “a nice change of pace” or “supporting the struggling service industry during a pandemic.” I’m not saying these things facetiously; they are honest sentiments, but I am using them to mask my brooding frustration with myself for ruining the original plan.

In order to maintain an even keel or status quo, a decision is made to make an excuse or give reason to something that is occurring that will cause a shift in the comfortable norm. This is an innate survival trait for most people, but to some, their mere awareness of a constantly shifting fulcrum is used actionably to counterbalance the narrative. This, in turn, can alter the perception of negativity by that person or a group of people. What the hell does that mean? Basically, a person in a position of influence can manipulate a situation to suit their (or their company’s) best interest, especially if the norm is shifting away from favorability.

The franchise owners in the National Football League are billionaires. Without throwing down the obvious race ace in their hand, the influence of these individuals and groups that own NFL teams is immense. Many of them also own good portions of the major city they call home. Everyone knowing your name and business in a small town is small potatoes, compared to that extrapolated over a metropolis with hundreds of thousands to millions of residents. We, as normal non-billionaires, would surely opt-out of the seedy and shady underbelly of that world. Here is where race comes in: that world runs on a system. That system hums along like a diesel generator that gets daily maintenance from a team of expert mechanics. The mechanics have lived by the adage “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it!” for centuries. It now translates to “Any change is a threat.”

I make excuses all the time for my Dallas Cowboys. My fandom has been torn down and rebuilt with masking tape and Popsicle sticks repeatedly for the last 25 years, each time seemingly with less care and skill than the last. Jerry Jones is known for a lot of things, but I will highlight his propensity to “give second chances.” Jones also holds the gavel over certain ownership privileges when it comes to collective bargaining, almost as a pseudo-commissioner. Jerry operates on both ends of the conversation masterfully and seems impervious to the backlash from either side. Jerry Jones is the face of the system and thus knows how to work it in his favor. He wields as much power as an owner as anyone, but seems to always endear himself with black players who might have otherwise been victimized by a system that is designed to mercilessly cull athletes with “question marks” or “character concerns.”

The system is inarguably racist. Fortunately, for many NFL teams, change has been embraced in the name of progress and improvement. In a league whose employees are 75 percent people of color, we are seeing the gears of progress slowly churn in the right direction. However, every 10 years we are reminded of the distance still to go when the owners and NFL Player Association union negotiate the next collective bargaining agreement. Negotiations between white billionaires and mostly black millionaires are an almost-perfect microcosm of race relations in the United States. Racial innuendos have even been uttered to the press by NFL brass. The same old inflammatory rhetoric to dehumanize and delegitimize minority groups even trickles down to the NFL draft process, mostly at the quarterback position.

Dak Prescott was an exemplary college quarterback and was obviously raised to be a fine young man, who carries himself with integrity and class. Prescott also has developed into a Pro-Bowl caliber player and ultimately earned a large contract extension. He is, however, far from the only example of a black quarterback whose draft stock (and earning power) was deflated immensely between taking his final snap at Mississippi State and his name being called in the fourth round in 2016. There was no evidence on tape to suggest he couldn’t read defenses, make quick decisions, throw accurately into tight windows, or grasp a pro-style offense operating under center. Each of these scarlet letters floated in from the ether, via anonymous scouts or attention-seeking “draft analysts.” Any and all micro-aggressions that can be applied to a black quarterback were predictably clamped to Dak in 2016, Deshaun Watson and Patrick Mahomes in 2017, Lamar Jackson in 2018, Kyler Murray and Dwayne Haskins in 2019, and Jalen Hurts and Jordan Love in 2020. Kyler Murray’s selection by Arizona at number one overall was the only example of these listed quarterbacks whose rookie signing bonus was not adversely affected by the rhetoric surrounding him as a prospect. This has been shown to be mostly due to the chasm of talent between him and the rest of that quarterback class. He also fit into new coach Kliff Kingsbury’s Air Raid offense like a glove. The extreme example of my point is the case of Lamar Jackson, who despite posting prolific passing numbers at Louisville, was pressured to change positions to “better utilize his skillset (athleticism).”

With time, the universe is expanding and horizons are broadening. Offensive coaching gurus are all the rage. They are adapting schemes around their talent, instead of vice-versa. Quarterbacks with the ability to run the football, regardless of race, are cherished like never before for their propensity to stress the defense and extend plays beyond the pocket. The days of labeling just the white quarterbacks as “cerebral” or “a field general” are dwindling. There will come a time in the near future when the rumors will stop swirling around only black quarterbacks about work ethic, study habits, and effort. Eventually, the men who run the system will stop apologizing, making excuses, or outright ignoring deficiencies and character flaws in white quarterbacks, while illuminating lesser blemishes elsewhere. Someday, football will look back and feel sorry for the missed opportunities to be better…earlier. It took a Brian Billick to trust Randall Cunningham, Dick Vermeil to empower Mike Vick, and Andy Reid to elevate Donovan McNabb and then Mahomes for the football world to change perspective. Hopefully, tomorrow brings permanence to the steps we are taking right now.

Our hands tell a story if you wholeheartedly assume truth in the work of palm readers and clairvoyants. The callouses, lines, and type of daily moisturizer can indicate someone’s work ethic, age, and marital status, so who is to say that something as rudimentary as thumb-to-pinky length cannot absolutely determine someone’s potential success on a synthetic field wearing spandex? I submit that an arbitrary threshold of half-centimeters should function as no less than a tiebreaker to determine someone’s professional worth.

A male gladiator with grandiose aspirations in the National Football League as a quarterback or wide receiver shall be vaulted to prominence and high regard if his hands, measured from distal phalanges one to five, tip to tip, are greater than or equal to 23.5 centimeters and, if not, ostracized and ridiculed as inferior. Of course, there are bound to be a few outliers and exceptions, but the gray area has no place in this mathematical world. It would take otherworldly ability in all other areas of concern to overcome such a pivotal deficiency as hand size. Large hands aid in performance in inclement conditions, by offering the athlete more surface area tension to maintain possession of the precious Faberge Egg that is the football. Turnover of possession is the leading cause of turnover in the workplace, which can be costly to the health of the tribe.

Here’s what I think. Hand size, shmand shize. Who actually thinks that “hand size matters” in professional football? Hahahaha! Let me just catch my breath real quick. Hahahaha! No, I’m fine. Really. They obviously don’t matter in the least. If you don’t believe me just ask Diontae Johnson. Pretty sure he has “Keebler Elf” hands and he still caught 88 passes and only dropped 16. Not sure how many other math majors are out here, but even using that new convoluted math, 88 > 16.

And who can forget the quarterback with the largest hands of all time, 28.58 centimeters to be exact, the perennial all-pro…I mean… one-time pro-bowler…hmm…starting quarterback…scratch that…back-up…well, barely a backup…only played in four career NFL games…Jim Druckenmiller…who completed 21 of 52 (40%) career passes with one touchdown and four interceptions. Should I keep going? I think I will.

I know you all wasted a late-round flyer on the 49er’s 4th round pick in the 2015 NFL Draft, WR DeAndre Smelter, and his mammoth 27.94-centimeter mitts? That’s DeAndre Smelter. I’m sure you’ve heard of him. DeAndre Smelter. He has one career catch for 23 yards. DeAndre…with a ‘De’…and then an ‘Andre’…just like D’Andre Swift but with an ‘e’ after the… never mind, you get the gist.

Bill Bellichick (Probably): I’m the smartest man alive. Tom still needs to get one more ring to catch me in the jewelry contest. Is Jarrett Stidham still looking at me? Ugh, he is just so terrible. Maybe if I don’t look over there, he will go away. Cam is just as handsome as Tom and Jimmy, AND more fashionable. Siri, remind me to get more baby oil for Jonnu’s abs. I bet Hunter Henry is self-conscious about his breath when meeting new people. I don’t know how to tell Bob that I need to stay wound tight and I don’t want massage coupons for Christmas. I’m sorry I got the wrong dog food, Nike, but did you have to bring Van Noy back? Are we on to Cincinnati, or onto Cincinnati? That kid with acne pushing carts at Costco has such a great attitude…I wonder if he can catch a slightly deflated football? Agholor can catch these millions falling from our burning building. We would have pursued Fuller if he didn’t get caught. Alexa, how much do ventriloquists make? Googling Tom Brady’s son’s age…