What's the Best Part of the NFL Offseason? More Football!

Well sports fans, it’s finally here. This weekend is the long-awaited NFL Draft, the equinox of the NFL offseason. Football junkies can now take a break from playing their tenth season on Madden’s Franchise mode, turn the channel to ESPN, and watch as draft analysts Mel Kiper and Todd McShay come to near blows after debating for the seventeenth time just how good quarterback prospect Matthew Stafford is. Seriously, the McShay-Kiper rivalry is right up there with Red Sox-Yankees, Hatsfields-McCoys, and Israel-Palestine. 

But to me, the NFL draft means two things. The first is that, as a Baltimore Ravens fan, I can can tune into the draft Saturday (and Sunday if I'm feeling hardcore) without a worry in my mind. Because if you required me to name only one facet of football in which the Ravens are far-and-away the most dominant team, it would without a doubt be drafting quality football players. And our ability to succeed so well in the draft all stems from our General Manager/Draft Wizard Ozzie Newsome. 

The thing about Ozzie Newsome is that (with the exception of one or two players) he possesses the ability to peer directly into the soul of an NFL prospect and determine just how good he will be as a professional football player. This, coupled with his monk-like patience, is why since joining the NFL, the Ravens' draft success has been unprecedented. So while other fans get anxious and prepare to second guess their GMs as April 25 looms (that's right, I'm talking about you, Jets fans), I and the rest of Baltimore's loyal can sit back and watch Ozzie do what he does best.

But along with the abundance of Ravens pride that I feel around this time of year, a part of me feels uneasy about how ridiculously obsessed with football me and so many other Americans are. While baseball sticks to spring and summer and basketball runs from winter to spring, football seems to be a year-long event now. There's preseason beginning in August, then the regular season runs from September to early February. From February to April, it's free-agent signing, rookie scouting, exclusive draft coverage, and of course, the announcement of next season's schedule (which now gets its own prime-time TV show). From May to July, things are a little calmer, but of course there is still constant coverage of training camp, who's getting injured, and who's holding out. 

Sure, the MLB and NBA both have their respective off-seasons, complete with drafts and free-agent signing periods, but the NFL is the only league to make a weekend extravaganza out of the draft, which now comes complete with its own (hilarious) drinking game. And of course, us sports fans eat it up. The NFL is becoming more than a football league that provides entertainment to millions of fans twenty weeks of the year; it is becoming a religion. And good old Google is there to confirm it. Go ahead, try it now: type "god" into the google search engine, it yields almost 70 million results. Now type "NFL" into google: 101 million. Okay, so maybe typing words into google isn't the most scientific way to prove a point, but you get what I mean. Football is becoming our golden calf, guiding us through the weeks of the year and dictating our moods. 

Now, I'm not a very religious person, so one might ask why I care so much. Well, as a sinner myself, I'm not really sure that I do care. Sure, sometimes I feel like I can be doing something more worthwhile with my time, but I enjoy following football religiously, and so do many others. So no grand conclusion here, just a suggestion that will maybe lead to more thinking and discussion about why football is so important to us, and if maybe America's obsession with football is unhealthy.