I love sports, so as a sportscaster, the fact it is my job to love sports makes my life a pretty good one. I get paid to do what I love. However, it is okay to love each sport to a varying degree, and while I grew up a baseball and hockey fan, and my primary love was the NBA through my college years, like most of America, the National Football League is now the love of my sports life.
When it comes to parsing out exactly why the NFL is the apple of my eye these days (acknowledging that I DO work for the Houston Texans' flagship station), I think it's the year round nature of the sport. The 17 regular season games and postseason are the sweet nectar, but the side dishes of the NFL's offseason are phenomenal — free agency, the draft, and all the milestone dates for things like the schedule release.
In fact, I would submit that the NFL not only does the offseason better than every other sport, but I don't think there is a single facet of the offseason where another league even comes close. Let's take a look:
FREE AGENCY
We've been experiencing this one first hand for the last few days. It doesn't matter how much star power there is on the open market, NFL fans will flock to their push notifications and nearest television screen to watch the insane metaphorical land rush of NFL teams irresponsibly blowing tens of millions of dollars on players who, more often than not, don't pan out. It's amazing! Comparatively, MLB free agency drags on for weeks, months sometimes. NBA free agency used to be great, when superstars would actually come available. Instead, nowadays, it's overpriced mid tier players getting dollar amounts where we are all like "Huh?"
DRAFT
This is probably the biggest blowout in professional sports — the NFL draft versus all the other sports' drafts. The NFL manages to get relevant content from practices at the Senior Bowl, from workouts at the NFL scouting combine. These are, on the surface, absurdly boring events that generate massive narratives, to be used in forums like social media and talk radio (yay, talk radio!). The draft itself is a three day event that the NFL is now able to sell to certain cities the same way they do the Super Bowl, showing the economic impact of tens of thousands of people descending upon the host city. Add in that college football is ridiculously popular, and it feeds right into the NFL draft, as we get to watch our favorite college players experience their next steps.
SCHEDULE RELEASE
The NFL is so good at what they do that they manage to squeeze TWO events out of the annual schedule release. First, they don't announce the date of the release until a few days before it happens, so we are all sitting around awaiting a date. From there, once we have the date, the unveiling of the actual schedule is exhilarating. Finding out your team's prime time games, overseas travel, and bye week (my wife and I travel to other NFL cities, when the Texans are on a bye) is quite fun! I don't even know if the NBA and MLB care about what their fans think of their schedule release.
OVERALL CALENDARFinally, the NFL does a really good job of making seemingly inconsequential dates feel important. The aforementioned schedule release is a prime example, but also dates like the franchise tag deadline (March 4, this year), the deadline to extend a 5th year option to players on rookie deals (usually early May), and the deadline to extend players on the franchise tag (July 15, every year) are all things that the NFL has brainwashed us (in a good way) into making a huge deal out of them. I am here for it! Way to dominate, NFL!
Listen to Sean Pendergast on SportsRadio 610 from 6 a.m. to 10 a.m. weekdays. Also, follow him on Twitter at twitter.com/SeanTPendergast, on Instagram at instagram.com/sean.pendergast, and like him on Facebook at facebook.com/SeanTPendergast.