The 2010 NFL Draft - Quantum Vortex Edition

Well, it’s almost here; the 2010 NFL Draft.

As I mentioned in my previous article on this subject, this has become a holiday season all its very own, complete with overly generous portions of ingenuous hype from the media and a sort of damp-stickiness from fawning corporate advertisers.

But, one of the most curious of the many NFL Draft by-products, is the popular and ever-present ‘mock draft’.

To wit: Everyone from official sports-media twerps to armchair know-it-alls partakes in this pastime. But regardless of the limited number of variables, there are hardly ever any two or three of them that completely agree.

Hmmm.

Could it be that football has some mysterious quantum attributes that render the finite sum of players vs. teams (and draft rounds) via a black hole into a neighboring universe? Moreover, does the NFL have some pull in the fifth dimension and most importantly, could a QB from one of those schools make it in this league?

Oh, oh, oh it’s magic!

Ahem, yes. Well, I could yield to that little bit of misty logic because it would finally solve the riddle of the mock draft itself or how so many mockers can come up with so many outcomes without more than that certifiable number of potential mockees.

And closer to home, the same logic works here because despite the overly overt distancing dance that both the Pros and the NCAA perform for our amusement, there seems little doubt that the college game is indeed the NFL’s farm league.

So, how many licks does it take to get to the Tootsie Roll center of a Tootsie Pop? Who cares? In the end, the chances that your team will even select in the slot assigned them going into the first round, is only around 50/50 at best.

And as for those later rounds, when names of unheard of players are suddenly crawling out of the league’s dimensional vortex? We’ll see them in the Pro Bowl in a few months and you will tell everyone you know that you had them nailed in your mock draft.

At least it makes for a great Tweet or two when all our best guesses have gone the way of Brian Bosworth.

In spite of the faults, it’s still the only game in town; a football lover’s oasis in the middle of round ball hell.

I’ll take as much as I can get, thank you!