For most college athletes, getting drafted into a professional league is something they have dreamed about from the time they started playing sports. And in the NFL where the careers of players so often last no longer than a few years, the moment a player is drafted and there name is broadcast to the world is often the highlight of their athletic career.
Obviously, this year that dream that so many players share had to take on a different look with the draft being held remotely due to concerns around COVID-19. Players weren’t able to walk across a stage and shake the commissioners hand, but they were instead huddled around televisions with family members.
Nonetheless, ESPN still televised the event as usual, with multiple channels dedicated to coverage of the event. And, despite the strange and sometimes awkward moments that came with the new format, things seemed to work fairly well for the most part. There was however, one big issue. Although this seems to be an issue every draft.
It seems like whenever an athlete gets drafted, ESPN tries to build a narrative about how they overcame hardship, not only on the field, but off the field as well to get to this point. While yes, that does work for some athletes like Josh Jacobs from last year’s draft who spent time homeless and sleeping in cars which had a major effect on his life, other times it feels like it is forced or shoehorned in leaving viewers to feel uncomfortable.
This year the most prominent case of this was when Clemson wide receiver Tee Higgins was drafted by the Cincinnati Bengals. Because Higgins was drafted fairly high with the first pick of the second-round, ESPN had a highlight package ready to show for him and had a graphic to pull up giving some information about him. As with most of the athletes, the graphic gave some personal information about Higgins, listing his hometown, some of his athletic accomplishments and some family information.
Then for some reason, ESPN decided to also tack on a sentence about how his mother struggled with drug addiction for 16 years. That is where the idea of a narrative of hardship becomes forced. That nugget of information seems completely irrelevant to what had just happened and seems to only have been added for the sole purpose of projecting this image of Higgins coming from a rough background and how the NFL and the contract he will receive will somehow save him and his family from that.
Listening to Higgins it is clear that his mother does mean a lot to him and while he isn’t afraid to speak of what she dealt with, it doesn’t make it feel any better the way ESPN handled it. Higgins seemed to take it in stride and deal with it quite well, but the burden shouldn’t be on him to clean up a situation that could have been avoided.
At this point it almost feels like a given that when a player gets drafted someone will cue some sad music and ESPN will run a short thirty second video about how a player’s family member passed away or is fighting a chronic disease. I understand that they might be trying to humanize the players or make it seem like they are these wonderful people who have managed to overcome so much off the field, but thirty seconds of video or one quick sentence of text is not enough time to fully digest or unpack the magnitude of what is being broadcast sometimes.
If these people or some of these incidents are so close to the players and are so influential in their upbringing, then they should be given the proper time they deserve. Deaths, injuries, diseases, financial problems and criminal records of family members shouldn’t just be mentioned in passing by some host reading from a teleprompter. These are sensitive issues that should be dealt with tastefully and responsibly so the players can feel a sense of pride in what is being shown rather than having a great moment be ruined.
J4804 Laird 