While the NFL Draft is SOOOOO long and drawn out as it is, with each team in the first round getting 15 minutes to make their selection, I’d be willing to give each team as much time as they wanted in exchange for not having to listen to ANYONE from ESPN while its going on. Chris Berman tries to be too cute, and have everything out of his mouth be the most clever thing anyone has ever said, and more often than not, he stumbles over his extra chins and gets facts wrong anyway. Good thing he has producers, or it would be like improv night at the old folks home with that guy. I also don’t need the “expert” breakdown from Ron Jaworski and Sean Salisbury, the latter with his 3 weeks experience as a backup quarterback and the former running his trap about this formation and that formation and whatever else. Who gives a damn how some 22 year old kid covered a receiver on ONE PLAY in college, when he’s moving on to an entirely different level. And could we just toss Andrea Kremer and her goat eyes out the window and give Suzy Kolber’s home phone number to Joe Namath (you thought the Pat O’Brien voicemail was bad!) and get those two out of here? I might have watched a combined 12 minutes of draft coverage, and at least three times I heard one of those two ask a player, “Who is (insert name of player being interviewed)?” in a somber, introspective tone. We know who he is, dammit, he’s the world’s latest multi-zillionare for playing a game! You’re not asking the King of Somalia why he taunts his people with cheeseburgers, you’re talking to a football playing punk kid!

Now, onto said kids, and how they affect my Sundays:

Braylon Edwards – As a Michigan fan, I like the pick, obviously. As a Browns fan, I’m all right with the pick, though I think there is alot more that could have been done with it. I just think the Browns fell victim to the lack of depth in the draft, and couldn’t find anyone to trade their pick to, and had to take the best player on the board. While there was some defensive help not too far down the way, in the long run, having a pair like Edwards and Winslow to throw passes up for grabs to will be a benefit. I just hope Braylon left all his dropsies in college.

Brodney Pool – Even with Bowling Green playing Oklahoma last year, I had never heard of this guy, but apparently he’s a pretty strong pick up. I think the Browns would have been better suited to find a cornerback rather than a safety, but as poor as that secondary has been, it doesn’t hurt. Of course it brings up an interesting situation now with Sean Jones, the second round pick last year, Brian Russell, the recently-signed safety from the Vikings, and Pool all trying to find time at the safety spot. There’s either going to be some shifting of positions, or the Browns could have the deepest corps of potential safeties in the league, while still having last night’s meatloaf on the corners. If Gary Baxter and Daylon McCutcheon go down, we’re left with pretty much our punt coverage team in the defensive secondary.

Other random draft thoughts:

-If I’m a Titans fan, and they don’t play the intro tune from Pac-Man everytime Adam “Pacman” Jones makes a tackle, I’d want my money back.

-Marlin Jackson to the Colts makes the transition into pulling for the Colts to do well a little easier, though when the Browns finally make their way to the AFC Title Game in 2007, Marlin Jackson and Cato June can rot in hell. Still, it makes it every simple to pull for the “hometown team” when they stock up on players I’ve already been following.

-Did Aaron Rodgers get a complimentary parachute with his hotel package in NYC? Fortunately, he was picked by Green Bay, who can afford to sit him on the bench and learn from Brett Favre, so it made for a simple, pain-free segue from his shot of finishing off the leftover drinks in the green room.

It still seems like we’ll have to wait for day two of the draft to see where any BG players may get picked up, but I think most of the five or six that are entered in the draft will see their moment come when the undrafted free agent period comes about on Monday or Tuesday.

In other news, I don’t watch much SportsCenter anymore, since its too much schtick and kissing the top teams’ collective asses than showing the day’s highlights. Though I did find it pretty comical that on a day that the Red Sox and Yankees both lost, their highlights came back to back 29 minutes into the show Friday night. Since the Yankees lost 10-2 today (somehow Texas got their second strong outing of the year from Chan Ho Park, the $16 million JUGS machine), I wonder where they’ll bury the highlights in tonight’s show. Heck, the NFL draft gives them plenty of incentive to forget them altogether!

Finally, thanks to a GREAT deal at Circuit City this weekend, I’m finally part of the TiVo generation. Not “officially”, because there’s still alot of setting up to do, but for the price of a service warranty, I picked one up today. Just in time to get a week’s worth of practice in before next Sunday’s premiere of Family Guy, too.

And that’s just freakin’ sweet.