ESPN’s Coverage Of The NFL Draft Had An Obvious Problem, And I’m Not The Only One Who Noticed

There’s always a lot of backlash surrounding the NFL Draft. Passionate fans have passionate opinions about who their favorite teams should select, and when the real life general managers make different choices, those fans tend to flood social media to loudly complain. This year was no different, except that not all of the complaining was actually coming from fans mad about the choices their preferred organization was making. A lot of it was coming from fans who weren't happy with ESPN and the network’s actual coverage of the event.

That’s because ESPN, whether intentionally or unintentionally, ended up framing their entire draft around one player: Shedeur Sanders. The divisive quarterback and son of NFL Hall of Famer Deion Sanders was projected by ESPN to be picked in the first round, but for various reasons, he wound up falling all the way to the fifth round. His slide was certainly a noteworthy story worth discussing, but it came up so frequently and so consistently over multiple days that it overshadowed everything else.

If a team needed a quarterback and didn’t draft Shedeur, there was discussion about why he wasn’t picked. If a team drafted a quarterback that wasn’t Shedeur, there was discussion on why he was taken ahead of Shedeur. We got segments where they cut away to experts talking about why he may have fallen. We got non-stop references from the main panel of talking heads themselves, especially Mel Kiper Jr who just could not let it go. We got a lower third referring to him as the best available player that ran as part of a loop for literally days. We even got references to the percentage chance a computer said he had to be drafted by any given point.

I was certainly interested in what was going on with Shedeur, as I think most fans were, but at some point, all the coverage just became overwhelming. It felt like ESPN was trying to frame the entire draft around one player, even though every single NFL team obviously felt he wasn’t good enough to be drafted in the first four rounds. There wasn’t any acknowledgement of the fact that there was a lot of speculation ahead of the draft that his stock was falling and many talent evaluators did not see him as a first round talent. It was just repeated statements about how unprecedented it was and how no one saw it coming.

I’m not alone on my island here. I don’t tend to use social media a ton while I’m watching TV but after a few hours of ESPN’s coverage the first day, I hit up X and saw an overwhelming number of angry fans expressing my exact same feelings. Someone put together a nine minute supercut of ESPN talking about Shedeur amidst other players being drafted. Many tweeted confusion about why the actual players being drafted weren’t being talked about more, and so many went after Mel Kiper Jr.

ESPN’s long-serving draft analyst was the loudest and most consistent in his complaints about Shedeur Sanders, as he had him ranked as one of the highest rated players in the entire draft. He was bewildered as to why teams weren’t drafting the quarterback, and he did not shut up about it for days. At some point, a lot of fans had enough, and there are multiple tweets calling for ESPN to move on from him that have more than 10,000 likes. This one below that has 31,000 likes…

After Sanders was finally drafted in the fifth round, you would have thought everyone would have been ready to move on, but that was not the case at all. He still kept coming up, and at one point, the talking heads had a pretty aggressive argument amongst themselves about the entire issue. Primary host Rece Davis basically told Mel Kiper Jr in a nice way to shut up about it, and Mel fired back pretty aggressively, claiming NFL teams are “clueless” when it comes to evaluating quarterback talent.

Various clips of the testy interaction were reposted on social media, and one of them on X that calls the exchange “embarrassing” has more than 25,000 likes. You can watch it below…

Look: figuring out how to cover something like this for ESPN is tough. There are a lot of casual sports fans who check in on events like this because they’re interested in getting an update on whatever the big story is. I get why they wanted to talk about it. It's the same reason we get Taylor Swift updates at every Chiefs game, and much of the WNBA discussion centers around Caitlin Clark.

I wanted them to talk about it, but there is a point at which it becomes too much. There’s a frequency cap you can hit in which it all starts to feel like you’re lessening everything else happening in order to elevate that one particular thing. ESPN was on the wrong side of that line last night, and it’s something their producers need to be aware of moving forward.