NFL commissioner Roger Goodell will be announcing selections from his basement during the NFL draft.
Photo: Mark Humphrey/Associated PressNFL commissioner Roger Goodell is still figuring out how to work from home. He wants to make sure his neighbors won’t be mad when he invites millions of strangers into his basement next week for a business party. He needs to find a way for those strangers to scream at him. He also has to decide what he’ll be wearing when he virtually hosts the NFL draft.
“I’m happy to tell you that I’m wearing pants as I speak to you,” Goodell said in an interview.
Pants have been optional in football or the past month because, like everything else, the NFL’s $16 billion business has been conducted from home. But nothing will compare to the technologically complex television extravaganza that the league has raced to pull off next Thursday.
The NFL draft is happening—but remotely because of the nationwide coronavirus shutdown. Instead of being on a stage in front of thousands of fans, Goodell will announce the picks from what his family dubs his “man cave,” the same place he watches games on Sundays.
Every team’s decision makers will also be at home, communicating with each other and the league electronically. Prospects, coaches and general managers who would usually be surrounded by camera crews will be filming themselves on do-it-yourself video kits provided by the league.
The draft wasn’t supposed to be like this. It was scheduled to take place in Las Vegas, the new home of the Raiders, and cement that the NFL wasn’t just happening in Vegas, it was staying in Vegas.
The draft is a made-for-TV event in which millions of fans decide, five months before the season, if their favorite team has a chance at winning the Super Bowl. It’s also the world’s most popular job fair: Ratings for the draft have risen each of the last five years, and could grow this year because so many people are hungry for fresh content.
The only guarantee on a typical draft day is that fans will ritualistically boo Goodell when he walks on the stage to announce every pick.
“I’ll miss that,” Goodell says.
The league has scrambled to replicate this ritual under the current circumstances. Goodell says he has fielded calls from the CEOs of league partners such as Verizon and AWS asking some form of the same question: “How can we help?”
Roger Goodell won’t have to dodge draft picks like former Clemson defensive tackle Christian Wilkins during this year’s draft.
Photo: Steve Helber/Associated PressThe solution the league devised was to turn Bill Belichick, Joe Burrow and every other draft notable into the equivalent of the YouTube vlogger who posts videos about how to properly poach an egg. The networks couldn’t send camera crews into team war rooms because there are no war rooms. The players couldn’t wait in a green room with a fancy suit on because there is no green room.
So the league sent kits with camera phones, light stands and microphones to 58 prospects, plus coaches and general managers and said: get ready to film yourself.
“It’s really the ultimate work from home experience on a really large scale where everyone’s watching,” said Michelle McKenna, the NFL’s chief information officer.
McKenna, last week, walked every NFL coach and GM through the draft-day experience. She built 10 of the kits herself to make sure it wasn’t “ridiculously hard.” She finished assembling them at 2 a.m. one morning, two weeks before the draft, so they could be sent out on time.
This year’s draft also required an unprecedented level of collaboration between three channels: The league-owned NFL Network and Walt Disney Co. ’s ESPN and ABC. As was the case last year, all three will carry the draft. But to keep things simpler, ESPN will oversee the bulk of production instead of each having their own crews and cameras. Errors and glitches are expected.
“It doesn’t have to be perfect, there is a lot of forgiveness out there,” said Seth Markman, the ESPN production executive in charge of the draft.
Markman will return to ESPN’s Bristol headquarters for the first time in about a month to oversee the event. Normally, he’d have as many as 20 people with him in the control room, but this year’s social distancing production means creating a second room and keeping it to seven people in each.
The league, meanwhile, is in charge of the cameras in the homes of the players. Word has been sent to the potential future stars that now is not the time to get cute with a subversive backdrop or T-shirt.
“We are definitely giving guidance,” McKenna said.
The experience will also be unusual for the ones doing the picking. Coaches, executives and scouts have to communicate by phone and video calls because they can’t be in the same place looking at the same, physical draft board. They also have to find ways to efficiently chat with other teams because there’s usually a frenzy of trades during the proceedings.
But in a strange way NFL Network draft analyst Daniel Jeremiah thinks the draft may move faster than normal because of these tenuous set-ups. With the potential for internet crashes or buffering issues, he expects less dilly dallying.
“You’ve got good Wi-Fi? Then get the pick in,” Jeremiah said.
The people stuck at home include those guys getting picked. Georgia’s Andrew Thomas, a 6-foot-5 and 315-pound offensive lineman, projects as arguably the best tackle in the draft. He was looking forward to the glitz of Las Vegas but now thinks this experience may be even more memorable because of the circumstances.
Soon, he said, he’ll have to do a test run to make sure the makeshift home-video equipment is set-up properly. The toughest decision is who can join him in the house he’s renting for draft night; social distancing guidelines mean it will just be his immediate family and maybe one or two others. But he knows his wardrobe will be different than what he initially had in mind. “It’ll be a little more casual,” he says.
Georgia offensive lineman Andrew Thomas is expected to be one of the top picks in this year’s NFL draft.
Photo: John Bazemore/Associated PressGoodell usually spends draft day dapping and bear hugging enormous men like Andrew Thomas. “We’ll figure out how to do a virtual hug next week,” Goodell said. “I’m not sure how that’s going to work.”
He promises there will also be virtual boos, via some sort of technological effort to integrate fan reaction.
Since he’ll be at home, Goodell may be able to get a few other things done while the draft goes on. He’ll be right near the laundry room.
“I may have to change a couple of loads,” Goodell says. “I can do it during the draft, I’ve got time during picks.”
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Write to Andrew Beaton at andrew.beaton@wsj.com and Joe Flint at joe.flint@wsj.com
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