The Rise and Rise of Selectionism
805,000 people attended the 2026 NFL draft to cheer on nature over nurture.
One of the the less expected social phenomenon of the last two generations has been the unstoppable growth of the National Football League draft of college players as a spectator event. The NFL draft visited Pittsburgh last week, and the first day drew 320,000 spectators to hear the names of the 32 first round picks being read off. It’s like a Woodstock-sized crowd showing up for a chess match … on a Thursday in April in Pittsburgh.
And over the last two days of the draft, when teams are getting deep into the weeds of selecting guys who might make a useful addition to the taxi squad in case somebody good gets injured, the NFL draft drew a combined 485,000 attendees, for a total of 805,000 spectators across the three days.
In case you are wondering, after the recent NFL success of white cornerbacks from the U. of Iowa, Cooper DeJean (first team All-Pro in 2025) and Riley Moss, all 27 cornerbacks picked in this year’s NFL draft appear to be black.
As Fortune 500 executives confided to each other 50-60 years ago, nobody ever got fired for hiring IBM. Similarly, if you bought a Control Data Corporation computer in 1970 but it messed up your inventory, you were in a lot more trouble than if you’d bought an IBM. Likewise, drafting a black cornerback in 2026 is a safer choice than picking a white or Samoan cornerback, even if your black pick gets burned for a touchdown in 2027.
Somewhat similarly, among NBA fans, watching regular season games apparently has become passé. Instead, the real action is now on discussion boards where fans hash out potential deals that could put together the perfect team, much like producer David O. Selznick kicking around whom to cast in Gone With the Wind with his agent brother Myron Selznick, George Cukor and Louis B. Mayer. It is all very Inside Basketball, but that’s the point: it’s more interesting to the 21st Century mind than is Real Basketball with its endless three-point shots.
To me, it seems kind of anti-blank slatist, anti-underdog, and subliminally racist for sports fans to be quite so open about how the really important thing is not how hard your athletes train or try during the game, but, simply, who they are when you pick them.
The NFL draft these days is like if 300,000 school test score fans showed up to hear the announcement of this year’s 5th graders’ test scores by school district: “And for the 37th straight year … Cupertino beats Compton!”
I mean, I’d go to cheer on Lexington, MA and Evanston, IL. I’d be there rooting for Frisco, TX to maintain its status as the top school district for African-American test scores (or will Frisco fall below the minimum number of blacks needed as it becomes increasingly South Asian?)
But, as you may have heard, I’m notoriously un-American.
In contrast, when I was a kid, there was less hoopla over selecting the best athletes and more over …
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