Changing Offseason?

The NFL never stays still. Not even when things seem so right. It's been known for a while that the expected dates of the 2014 NFL Draft were going to run into a conflict with Easter happenings at Radio City Music Hall. Rather than change venues, it looks like the NFL has decided to move the draft into May. May 15-17 to be exact. That's about three weeks later than usual. This may seem to be an inconvenience but rather the NFL sees it as an opportunity to do what they really want to do. There's been talk for a while now that NFL decision makers want to shift the entire offseason. They want to move the Scouting Combine and the Draft back about a month. I was thinking that the start of the league year, and free agency, would move from the start of March as well. Now, it sounds like the start of the league year will remain the same. If the NFL moves the Scouting Combine to the middle of March that means that it will follow the start of free agency. This, at first, seemed absurd to me. That's only because the NFL is doing the unthinkable and changing that which I know so well. After about a second of despair, it occurred to me that moving the Scouting Combine to a couple weeks after free agency might actually be a stroke of genius. Most of what happens in free agency happens in the first couple of weeks. That becomes the time before the Combine. Teams will go to Indianapolis with a better sense of their needs for the draft. Seems so simple. So brilliant.

While it looks like the move of the 2014 NFL Draft to May 15 is a done deal, other offseason changes won't take place until 2015. Those changes, while likely, may not be a slam dunk. There's speculation that colleges might have some real issues with the changes. The colleges have been pretty patient over the flocks of scouts and coaches that storm onto their campuses throughout the spring to interrogate their football-playing "students." Moving the draft back a few weeks will extend the parade of NFL people and really test that patience. Maybe. Who knows?

When talk of monkeying with the NFL offseason schedule first started popping up I figured that it was an attempt to put a league event in every month of the calendar year. If the league's objective is to keep their product on the front pages and tongues of everyone they underestimate that product. The NFL is a year round hot topic no matter what they do. Free agency is big. The draft is bigger. Everything in between has fans wanting more. I didn't like the idea of changes when there was no reason to change. I see the light now. In particular, I see the benefit of moving the Scouting Combine. I hope that I'm wrong about the colleges possibly having issues with the changes because I think that it's good for the NFL.