The drills will be in prime time.
From a ratings perspective, pretty much everything the NFL touches turns to money, so it’s not a surprise that the league has decided to hold the combine drills — especially Thursday’s quarterback throwing sessions — in prime time for the first time. The only real question is, what took the NFL so long? Now, if you want to watch the drills, you may be able to do so live as opposed to from DVR when you get home from work. The drills will be shown on NFL Network from 4:00 to 11:00 p.m. EST Thursday through Saturday, and then 2:00 to 7:00 p.m. on Sunday.
As Joel A. Erickson of Indystar.com reports, the aforementioned Foster, the rest of the National Invitational Camp staff and a Combine Working Group of five general managers, including the Colts’ Chris Ballard, have spent the past six months working on the new timing.
Foster, for one, would have preferred a more gradual rollout.
“I will tell you that strategically, I never would have implemented this much change in any one year, simply because of the potential domino effect it can have on the logistics involved in the event,” Foster said. “With regard to that, it’s been an incredible challenge.”
For the league, it’s all about visibility. And profit. And ratings. To the extent that the NFL does things in a ready-fire-aim fashion (which is to say, frequently), those in charge of logistics will just have to deal with it.
“Interest in the Combine has continued to grow,” Peter O’Reilly, the NFL’s executive vice president of events, said in a statement. “By shifting the on-field drills to primetime, it’s easier for fans to watch on NFL Network and across the various NFL digital platforms, as well as to attend for free at Lucas Oil Stadium.”
These changes are designed to bring the combine out of its former veil of secrecy and into a new era of fan interest and involvement. The real test will be whether it affects the process in a negative sense that has the league backtracking to a more businesslike model.
Touchdown Wire editor Doug Farrar previously covered football for Yahoo! Sports, Sports Illustrated, Bleacher Report, the Washington Post, and Football Outsiders. His first book, “The Genius of Desperation,” a schematic history of professional football, was published by Triumph Books in 2018 and won the Professional Football Researchers Association’s Nelson Ross Award for “Outstanding recent achievement in pro football research and historiography.”