Draft Day (2014)

 Originally published in Wildcat Weekly on April 4, 2025

 

Draft Day is among the worst movies that I love.

The script is clunky, cliche-ridden, and borderline nonsensical. Costner’s performance is among his least charismatic. The romance and workplace dynamics have aged poorly, football’s most moribund franchise centers the thing, and the entire plot collapses if you throw a minimally critical eye at it.

And yet, I love Draft Day. I adore the ridiculous fan-fiction lunacy of this glorified NFL marketing device.

Sonny Weaver Jr. (Costner) is GM of the NFL’s Cleveland Browns, and he’s got personal and professional conflicts colliding on the biggest day of his year. One week after losing his father, Sonny receives an ultimatum from the Browns’ owner: “Make a splash” at the NFL Draft or find alternate employment. Pushed to the brink, Sonny starts wheeling and dealing, leading to chaos as the first pick he’s just acquired approaches.

While I stink at March Madness, I know the NFL Draft. I’ve been a late-April diehard since middle school, and I even won the NFL’s Predict the Pick contest in 2008, meaning the league flew me to NYC for the NFL Draft one year later. The film evokes my experience: I’ve sat in Radio City Music Hall, I’ve watched the colorful screens, and I’ve waved to Mel Kiper Jr. Draft Day is, for me, nostalgic—for the place, for the event, for the era when I knew so much about sports I could actually win a contest.

Alas, that special connection is a gift and curse for the movie: I love what it harkens to but also see through the artifice. Draft Day is a sincere movie portraying the event with epic import, but it’s silly, half-baked fan fiction. While diehards like me devour the drama of the Falcons picking Michael Penix after signing Kirk Cousins, Draft Day’s writers know they need human drama to reach everyone else, so they tell a thrilling story…that violates so much of how the event works that it offends me, the only person who would eagerly watch the thing.

Still, there’s something satisfying about Draft Day. It’s a comfort movie that sounds like an event I love, and it delivers a madcap final act of sheer lunacy that induces eye-rolling chills. I know I’m watching something with the intellectual richness of Cool Ranch Doritos, but I’m obsessed with an event where 22-year-olds get hats and sign contracts for more than I’ll make in my entire career. Perhaps the delirium of Draft Day is, secretly, just right for the occasion?

Draft Day is a ridiculous head-shaker, but it’s my ridiculous head-shaker. I love the thing, warts and all.