Read My Draft Coverage or I Sic This Dog on You!
A sneak preview of the Too Deep 96! Plus ... Pat McAfee says dumb things, and a bonus essay about department store shopping in 2025.
Pat McAfee, the Colts punter turned multimillionaire podcast dudebro, claimed that on February 27, his “sources” spotted Ohio State quarterback Will Howard throwing passes in an Indianapolis hotel parking lot at 11 PM. Per McAfee, Howard threw the passes “over a parking thing,” with someone catching them on the other side.
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This may have been the dumbest “scoop” in the history of draft hoopla. Or the second-dumbest behind the Shedeur Sanders Pythagorean 40-Yard Dash Fiasco, which I will not delve into at the moment. It’s not the dumbest thing McAfee has ever said, because the man is a global supplier of babbling idiocy, but it’s evidence that he should steer far clear of anything resembling “analysis,” “journalism” or “adult discourse.”
There are two major problems with McAfee’s tall tale. The first is that an NFL prospect like Howard surely stayed at one of the short list of downtown hotels where all the Combine prospects are sequestered: the Westin, Omni Severin, Hyatt Regency and a few others. These hotels are connected to the Convention Center by pedestrian “Habitrails” one story above street level, and the Convention Center is connected to LucasOil Stadium by an underground 10 foot-by-10-foot corridor where you can hear water dripping in the distance.
The primary reason the Combine remains in Indy is because the logistics are so simple: players can be shunted from hotel to meeting room to the media area to the stadium and back without ever stepping foot outside. An obscure prospect might conceivably stay a mile away from the action. The quarterback of the defending National Champions – with fame, an agent and some NIL bucks – ain’t staying a mile away.
You know what downtown hotels rarely have? PARKING LOTS. They have garages. There are some open green spaces scattered around downtown Indianapolis, but no parking lots expansive enough for a future NFL quarterback to toss the ol’ pigskin around.
The stadium has a parking lot, of course. But McAfee and his purported sources specified a hotel.
There’s a parking lot across from the stadium, for convention center employees I believe, which could be mistaken for a hotel parking lot. I have walked past it around 11 PM or beyond on many February nights, including the night in question. Even in decent weather, it’s an absolute wind tunnel because of the large nearby buildings. If Howard went out there to test his ability to fire off passes in bad conditions, he would have been too bundled up to be recognized.
(Also, there’s lots of construction around downtown Indianapolis right now. Some places near the hotels which used to be somewhat open are now fenced off and full of cranes and girders.)
OK, let’s say Howard spent his Combine at the Holiday Inn where I stayed. Its parking lot is so small that even I could throw a football across it, but Howard was reportedly heaving it over architectural structures, so maybe Emeka Egbuka was waiting for targets in the Staybridge lot.
Here’s the kicker to this punter’s dizzy tale: no one with any Combine reporting experience would ever find it noteworthy to see prospects practicing in their free time.
As mentioned, the prospects inhabit the same Habitrails as everyone else. Their performance academies sometimes provide workout spaces for them, but it is by no means unusual to see future NFL players in random hallways around the convention center stretching, jogging and practicing basics. I’ve watched quarterback prospects toss the ball down hallways to loosen up. I have also seen them dining with their families and slipping out of nightclubs in their official Combine gear (it’s a likely conversation sparker with the ladies) in the wee hours.
No one with McAfee’s knowledge of the NFL should find it noteworthy that a prospect was doing something football-related in his free time during the Combine. But then, no one who spent eight years working at Lucas Oil stadium should think there are nearby hotels with big parking lots.
My guess is that someone who knows McAfee saw some Caucasian lad in Combine apparel casually tossing some footballs around somewhere. They told McAfee, who reacted like a wide-eyed blogger with his very first press credential. OMG OMG OMG I have insider info!
McAfee was suspiciously effusive in his praise for Howard early in the draft cycle. He even issued a denial that he was being compensated by Howard’s agent.
Agents do peddle in media favors, if not cash, to get a player’s name out there. Talk up my minor client and you get access to my major one. On the other hand:
Howard is well known, if not highly regarded as a prospect. He doesn’t need name recognition; he needs validation by experts. But,
McAfee is not an “expert” that anyone who regularly wears shirts with sleeves takes seriously. And,
McAfee is now a pretty big fish who is as likely to perform the favors as ask for them.
If I were Howard’s agent (who I don’t know), I would actually bristle at praise so effusive that it sounds like a paid political advertisement. It makes Howard look weaker.
So I doubt McAfee was favor-peddling. Maybe he really likes Howard. Or he’s just catering to his fanbase’s less-than-discerning tastes with a bold championship-quarterback-is-good take. Or he’s just a doofus who really believed he had a scoop.
Either way, McAfee got draft season off to a rollickingly inane start last month. There’s nowhere to go but up in the weeks to come. Right? Hopefully?
As for Howard, I have watched the same Ohio State footage over and over again for the past few weeks, and I am starting to feel like Charlton Heston watching Woodstock in Omega Man:
Howard has all the traits of a sturdy NFL backup. That’s it. If he were more than that, it would have jumped off the screen while I was studying Egbuka or Donovan Jackson.
But perhaps I need to see Howard tossing the pigskin around outside of a hotel window to really appreciate him.
Upcoming Schedule
The Too Deep 96 kicks off tomorrow and will continue through most of April. Here’s the initial schedule:
March 25th: #1 Travis Hunter Breaks the Draft
March 26th: #2 Ashton Jeanty: Suddenly Saquon
March 27th: #3-6 Game Wreckers Anonymous
March 28th: #7 Stop Worrying and Love Cam Ward’s Bombs
March 29th: #8-11 More Songs About Edge Rushers and CBs
March 30th: #9-19 Tyler Warren through, sigh, Mike Green
March 31st: #20 Shedeur Sanders Makes People Stupid
April 1st: ???????????
April 3rd: #21-32 Finally, Some Wide Receivers! (And More Defensive Linemen)
Here’s an appetizer sampler of what you’ll read in the days and weeks to come:
Dylan Sampson runs like he wants to hurt someone. Possibly himself. He takes on tacklers like an eight-pound bowling bowl trying to smash through a wall.
Armond Membou blocks like a forklift carrying a palette full of sandbags down a steep incline.
Jalon Walker may have the best voice in the 2024 draft class. But prospects with great voices sometimes get overdrafted. Anthony Richardson sounds like a cross between Barry White and Keith David voicing Goliath the Gargoyle. Panthers tackle Ickey Ekwonu was a theater kid. Both were Top 10 draft picks. Neither has lived up to those selections. REAL FOOTBALL PLAYERS CANNOT CARRY A TUNE. If you have heard him sing, you know that Terry Bradshaw is not the exception.
J.J. Pegues is the best combination defensive lineman/quarterback I have ever seen. He’s also the only … oh, you can figure out how to finish this sentence.
Carson Schwesinger is one of those linebackers whose biggest flaw is that he is a linebacker entering an NFL that prefers to build all of its defenses around two pure pass rushers, two 320-pound juggernauts, six cornerbacks and one overtaxed designated Saquon Barkley chaser.
Jaxson Dart generated a lot of buzz during Senior Bowl practices. Somehow, I missed it while buzzing around the actual bleachers of Hancock-Whitney Stadium that week. Granted, I flew home during Dart’s final day of practice. He must have absolutely crushed it. He spent the first day mishandling snaps (Dart operated strictly out of the shotgun for the Rebels) during a glorified walkthrough that lulled most of the media to sleep. The second day of practice was also heavy on stretches and throwing against air; maybe I’m underestimating how good Dart looked against air. Even if Dart became Tom Brady on the third day, there’s a chance that his “buzz” is based on two or three throws. Some draftniks are lightweights that way.
Not the usual jargon-laden, sleep-inducing scouting reports, right?
If draft coverage is not your bag, well … you know when it will end, and there will some other content (including the All-Time Rams Top 5 QBs) scattered through April. But I hope you tag along on this journey. I’ve been writing about the draft in some capacity for 25 years. It’s a labor of love. These aren’t scouting reports, but 200-to-1,000 word symphonies to the football gods. And all the profiles will still be there after the draft, if you just want to know more about the players selected by your favorite team.
See you tomorrow for the Too Deep 96 kickoff! Though there may be a bonus essay after the photo.
Off-Topic Topics: Shopping (With) (For) By the Elderly
As a small child, I loved to get lost inside department store garment racks.
The grand East Coast department stores of the 1970s – John Wanamaker’s, Gimbels, Strawbridge & Clothier, Bamberger’s – were like opium dens for my mother. She abandoned all sense of time and responsibility and fell into a numb retail euphoria instantly upon entering one. She often left four-year-old me in the care of my ten-year-old brother in some random aisle as she made a pilgrimage into the women’s apparel section to “look for one or two things” and disappeared for hours, days, months.
These were the days before cellphone games, tablet videos, or even Cadillac strollers that doubled as mobile amusement platforms (toys, snacks, drinks, cleaning supplies, child-strength No Judgement If You Dose Him at Noon-brand sleepy-time sniffle medicine) for squirrelly tykes. A barely-supervised preschooler in a low-stimulus environment was forced to his imagination. And so I did: plunging into the towering cylindrical racks of 1970s fashions in search of jungle adventure, or perhaps Narnia.
A nimble squirt could slip through the skirts or skirt though the slips and arrive in a sort of idyllic glade in the middle of a rack, then tumble out the other side and crawl beneath some slacks and into some more underbrush. In 30 seconds, I could be in the shoe department, or the appliances, or the parking lot. My brother was too big to take the same path but too small to see over the racks to locate me. Mom was busy staring at three identical blouses like a stoner at Coachella mesmerized by his fingers.
Eventually, but not always, I was found and chastised. At least once, I had my mother paged over the store intercom. Approaching a clerk and giving my mother’s full name was a skill I was taught, rather wisely, at an early age.
Mom and my brother turned out to be about 20 paces away. I received a stern lecture – I guess I was supposed to remain lost and frightened – and Mom was mortified, though she managed to keep shopping.
Mom gets her revenge now that she is in her mid-80s.
“I need to go to Boscov’s to pick up a few things,” she told me during a recent visit to her assisted-living community.
“Gosh, Mom: can’t my brother take you? Or one of your old-lady pals who still drive, against their children’s wishes? What about the rickety assisted-living shuttle bus, held together by the statue of Our Lady of Unsnappable Timing Belts on the dashboard?” I stopped short of volunteering my wife’s services; I slept on the porch for a week after her last shopping trip with mom.
“I want to talk to the people in the hearing aid department,” she added, placing me on DEFCON 2.
Mom needs a hearing aid. She had one years ago, an expensive one, but couldn’t manage the battery charger and other basic maintenance functions. We’re working on a better solution. It won’t be a $300 hunk of cheap circuitry and wishful thinking endorsed in department-store circulars by Joe Namath.
“Mom, we are not allowed to purchase a hearing aid without my brother’s approval,” I warned. Claiming I lack the authority to do something I just don’t feel like doing is one of my go-to life skills and most charming personality traits. We can’t stop for ice cream without asking mommy. I cannot change your grade; you have to ask the principal. I cannot research that statistic; you must ask Aaron Schatz. Only Substack can give you a refund.
“Can we at least talk to them?” Mom flashed her dog-in-the-Sara-McLachlan-PSA eyes. She needs the comfort of her Other Church. And she’s not above calling me “Warden” if I don’t acquiesce now and then.
So we retrieve the credit card hidden in her dresser drawer, then the 15% off coupons scattered somewhere on her “dining room table” which is actually an eight-inch deep midden of junk mail, photos of long-deceased family members and perhaps the original Magna Carta.
(Mom refuses to let me tidy up the table. She believes – accurately – that I will snatch the unpaid bills and undeposited checks that she hordes as prized keepsakes. I did manage to pilfer a letter from the Social Security Administration, which I was sure would inform her that she had been declared nonexistent and her checks used for research and development on space dunebuggies whose engines explode if exposed to dust. Luckily, it turns out her benefits are actually going up 0.0004%.)
Forty-five minutes of paper shuffling later, we’re off to do the one thing neither of us liked to do with each other for half a century.
I don’t know why mom shopped with me so often when I was a tyke. My grandmother co-raised me and lived a five-minute drive away, as did some spinster aunts. It’s likely that I was in tow during many mall trips because I also needed clothing, which means I had to try on polyester slacks or church-appropriate sweaters, which guaranteed that I would spend the whole trip, Allan Quartermain excursions through the dress jungle included, in a snot-weasel mood.
This was the golden age of Garanimals, which apparently still exist. Garanimals are a clothing line designed for parents who are worried about their children’s clothing being color-coordinated but are color-blind lack the fashion sense to not pair an orange shirt with bright purple pants. If a pair of brown corduroy slacks had a little bear on its tag, it only matched with bear tops. Hippos matched hippos, wombats with wombats, like on Noah’s ark.
And yes, little boys wore brown corduroy slacks in the 1970s. Also dark green ones. We all made vvvvvt-vvvvt record-scratch sounds when we walked. Corduroy slacks led directly to the rise of early hip-hop.
My sons never wore Garanimals because it is now easy to find elastic-waisted blue jeans, grey sweats and neutral-color warmup slacks for children, along with superhero or princess tops the children actually like wearing, rather than miniature versions of adult clothes in colors associated with bad acid trips and fabrics best suited for transporting pineapples.
I was also a husky lad; the retail euphemism of the era for a fat kid consigned to wear fat kid clothes like a disgusting fat kid.
Old photos and other anecdotal evidence reveal that I was only slightly plump – more of the miniature version of an aging first baseman than of an SEC guard in danger of losing his scholarship – but those cute little Garanimals were dead serious about body shaming.
The husky lad section of the department store was in a forlorn corner where other shoppers would not have to interact with the failed parents who weren’t raising sleek future Charlie’s Angels or Green Berets. The selection of Easter sportcoats with lapels wide enough to land a DC-10 was always sparse in the husky department. No wonder mom needed to bathe in the healing waters of the women’s section after finally finding something that fit her recalcitrant little butterball.
The nearest Boscov’s is located in what was once called the Echelon Mall but is now an ancient ruin with one of the last living department stores clinging to its edges like a cargo cult huddled beside the remains of a forgotten civilization.
You must be 50 years or older to enter Boscov’s. They card. It still has tacky glass chandeliers and plays Forgotten Lite R&B of the 1970s at a volume just high enough to confuse an elderly shopper who is between hearing aids. The same dresses I besmirched with my grubby hands in 1975 while searching for El Dorado are still available, at clearance prices.
Fortunately, there is no hearing aid kiosk at this particular store. I express my incalculable disappointment to mom, but she already has that glassy look in her eyes. I make sure she’s securely fastened to the little cart which will double as her walker, then set her free. She is barely five feet tall, so she vanishes as soon as she toddles into the sprawling Summer Fashions for Octogenarians department.
Killing time, I wander over to men’s wear. But my closet is already overflowing with quarter-zip henleys, solid-colored golf shirts, knockoff athletic wear and Burl-E-Dad Capacious Ass-Room jeans. Nothing calls to me.
I think of slipping out of the store, but the Echelon Mall, on life support until recently by virtue of a Yankee Candle retailer, a pizza joint, a karate dojo and one of those county passport processing centers, is now dead, per misericordiam Dei, requiescant in pace. The Boscov’s exit/mall entrance is even sealed.
I stared through the glass at the abandoned shopping complex. As a young teen, I was free to roam while mom shopped. There was a Sam Goody record outlet (which also sold guitar strings), a B. Dalton Bookseller, a Kay Bee Toy & Hobby that carried both Strat-o-Matic products and baseball/football cards, a food court, and in the later 1980s, a Babbage’s computer games and supplies shop. And of course there were girls: 1980s girls, with architectural hair and jeans ripped provocatively at the thigh, all of them dating guys with names like Gambino or Buttafuoco who drove IROCs, had trim waistlines and possessed the self-confidence to actually speak to them.
Mom still took forever to shop in those days, but I could purchase a Bill James Baseball Abstract and get halfway through the National League before she staggered out of Macy’s like Andy Capp out of the pub at closing time. It’s all gone now except the girls, now soon-to-be grandmas guiding their elderly parents through the aisles of Boscovs.
Perhaps 10 minutes had passed; time to check on mom. Long-leash supervision works best with her. The “few things” she needed were purely hypothetical. Her shopping lists tend to read “stamps, toothpaste, call Cousin Carmine, ask Michael to fix the hair dryer, toothpaste.” I tried to make shopping trips more efficient in the past, but that only brought mutual frustration.
“I need white socks,” she once told me when I tried to speed up a shopping excursion. “Not thick ones. Not flimsy ones. Not long or short ones. You know, the good kind.”
I combed the entire store and returned with two-dozen pairs of white socks of every conceivable style in the time she took to examine a checkered blouse in the size she wore before my birth.
“No, not these socks,” she said to all of them. “You know, the good kind.”
Our interactions were always like this. One Christmas Eve, in my Baseball-Abstract-and-ogling adolescence, she implored me to play some of the “pretty” music on our living room stereo while her friends were visiting. I tried the Barbra Streisand album, the Mormon Tabernacle Choir, Handel’s Messiah, the Nutcracker, the local classical music channel (now-defunct WFLN), even “Merry Christmas, I Don’t Want to Fight” by The Ramones in a burst of exasperation.
“No. You know, the pretty music,” mom said after every selection. I slipped away to a friend’s house to raid his parents’ basement bar.
I lost sight of Mom in Boscov’s during a shopping trip a few months ago. She rounded a bend from the candy shoppe to housewares: an unanticipated detour. I thought about paging her, as I had done so long ago, but realized that she would probably not hear it. I found her contentedly browsing random knick-knacks. I now schedule reconnaissance flybys at regular intervals, close enough to verify her well-being but far enough to not be scolded for “rushing” her, knowing she gets weary and hungry quickly, just as I used to.
Sure enough, she ran out of steam and could be coaxed from Boscov’s with the lure of a trip to the diner for eggs and scrapple. Her bounty of ladies’ wear, some of which might conceivably fit her, came to about 70 dollars after she stacked her discounts. The cost, more-than reasonable by today’s standards, shocked her. I would soon be paying almost as much for two orders of scrapple and eggs.
Mom returned to the home almost delirious with joy: a rare emotional state for a woman of her age, ethnicity and worldview. I was happy, too, for an activity with her that did not escalate into some sort of tantrum or descend into morose recriminations. That must have been how she felt 50 years ago, after she finally extracted me from my base camp within the evening-wear thicket, squeezed me kicking-and-squealing into and out of preschooler-wear, weathered my precocious brattiness, tossed me in the back of the Thunderbird and finally deposited me among my Matchbox cars so she could enjoy a cigarette in the bathroom in peace.
As for Boscov’s: of course that is where I now shop for old-guy non-fashions. I own a credit card and sometimes show up with a paper coupon. I know what’s coming for me. And I am certain that Boscov’s will still be there when my sons are tracking me around the drab flannels department electronically, when my shopping lists include the names of forgotten quarterbacks, when I’m more cantankerous and incorrigible than I am now. And probably long beyond that, perhaps until the end of time: a monument to a abandoned realm; a testament to a forgotten era when busy mothers couldn’t shop by phone; a reminder that it's still beneficial to get out of the house once in a while and look at/touch/smell the things you need to purchase, even if it's inconvenient and aggravating. Inconvenience and aggravation, after all, are part of growing up, growing old, being alive.
But if I ever get too nostalgic for inattentive parents losing track of their feral preschoolers during cursed shopping trips, there’s a Walmart just down the street.
The first time I saw McAfee on TV I wondered why he was dressed in a Vanilla Ice starter kit. Still wondering
Those same racks of slacks and skirts and slips still made for amazing adventures in the early ‘90s!