It depends on the draft and the drafter and on the amount of alcohol consumed and the volume of faith in things working out in favor of the most enjoyable possible outcome. But it surely happened thousands of times at some point last weekend in some room soggy with the smell of corn chips and dudes that a person drafting a fantasy football team decided that it was worth drafting Josh Gordon who was one of the best players in the NFL during the 2013 season.
This was likely a couple of hours on. Gordon led the NFL in receiving by a healthy margin last year but he was being drafted after 40 or so other receivers because he had received a year long suspension from the NFL earlier this offseason and was undertaking a long shot appeal to get it reduced as those fantasy drafts were happening. So Gordon's name would only have been called sometime after those of many lesser players and not until the moment when the prospect of drafting the number three receiver on the Bengals or the number one receiver on the Raiders became less appealing than betting that the NFL would not uphold the year long suspension of one of the league's most exciting players over the 0.01 extra nanograms of THC per milliliter that showed up in one but not both of Gordon's league mandated drug tests.
There is a reason why it took multiple hours and multiple drinks for this particular bet on Josh Gordon's immediate future to get placed though. The NFL reminded everyone why on Wednesday when the league upheld Gordon's suspension on appeal. In doing so the NFL behaved just as everyone that follows the NFL knew they ultimately would. This predictable exercise and defense of its own authority is in a way that's satirical without quite being funny more or less what defines the NFL in 2014.
Dawgs by Nature Dawgs by Nature
No the NFL just keeps doing the opposite of this it makes indefensible decisions and then defends them on the grounds that these decisions were made by the NFL. This bloat and its attendant tendency to circular self service is a familiar thing that happens to institutions and it is not a good thing. It happens when institutions become too big or too unaccountable or too otherwise distant from and uninterested in anything but the performance of their own authority it is what we see over and over from the NCAA as it circles the drain during its honkingly baroque terminal phase.
And so it is with the NFL in this case and those others as it goes about exercising and re exercising its authority in a vacuum of its own devising. The rules are the rules and of course games need rules. The league needs to enforce them and of course it should. But the NFL is doing something else here just as it did with Ray Rice. It's performing its rituals of no excuses enforcement with an unexplaining and uncompromising vigor that's deliriously and crazily and willfully out of context. The result is a sort of meta discipline that feels all the more arbitrary and unsatisfying because of its pretensions to cold corporate logic.
The NFL believes that the decisions it makes are just and believes as much because the NFL is making those decisions it believes that its punishments are just specifically because they are the NFL's punishments. If it was predictable that the NFL would behave exactly as it has it's because the performance and defense of its signature tautologies is now reflex and just sort of what the NFL does.
The game surprises us which is why we come back. The league seems to have defined its duty as being the opposite of that to replace football's irrepressible instinct for surprise with the league office's own buttoned up and utterly unreasonable version of reason. The NFL does not just enforce order it seeks to create it and maintain it in a way that is coming to crowd out everything else. In this sense an appeal on a dicey suspension is the same thing to the NFL as an overzealous touchdown celebration it is a thing that does not fit and so it is a thing that cannot stand.
And so of course the NFL saw no reason to overturn or reconsider or compromise here or anywhere it was reviewing a decision made by the NFL and therefore a decision that was inherently considered and correct. This is how the NFL justifies all its many unjustifiable aspects to itself if not to anyone else. This is the NFL's most stubborn and self defeating fantasy and it's no fun at all.
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