Draft Day: 5 Things It Got Right About The NFL Draft (& 5 Things It Got Wrong)

In 2013, Ivan Reitman directed a movie about the NFL draft called Draft Day. The premise of the film was the hapless Cleveland Browns and their under-fire General Manager needing to make a splash in the draft to appease ownership and get fans excited for the upcoming season. Starring Kevin Costner, Jennifer Garner, Dennis Leary and Chadwick Boseman, the movie was a modest success.

With the real life NFL Draft happening on April 23rd-25th, it’s time to take a look at this film six years later. What did it get right, and what did it miss the mark on?

10 Right: Arian Foster As Ray Jennings

The decision to cast then-Houston Texans star running back Arian Foster as top running back prospect Ray Jennings may have been questionable, considering Foster’s performance wasn’t noteworthy, but it was still a cool moment nonetheless.

Foster went undrafted in the 2009 NFL Draft after a poor senior season, but became a sensation in his second year with the Texans. earning Pro Bowl nods from 2010-12 and leading the league in touchdowns twice. As Ray Jennings, Foster finally had the opportunity to experience being drafted, something he admitted in featurette interviews he really enjoyed and appreciated.

9 Wrong: The Lack Of Information

Throughout the movie, Browns GM Sonny Weaver is given revelatory information about his two draft targets, quarterback Bo Callahan and edge rusher Vontae Mack, all in the course of a matter of hours the day of the draft. While we get this is a movie, in real life, having all this information come up at the last minute is simply inexcusable.

Scouting and predraft work takes months, not hours, and it’s hard to believe Sonny and his scouts did not find out the information about either player earlier, or for that matter, that the Browns didn’t at least do some preliminary fact finding on Callahan and Mack’s character at all.

8 Right: Roger Goodell As Himself

As unpopular as Commissioner Roger Goodell is among NFL fanbases, there is no doubt that casting him as himself was a brilliant idea.  Goodell was cast to do the job he does every April: strut up to the podium, announce picks, and generally be the face of the league.

Reitman could have cast a veteran actor as the NFL commissioner, but it wouldn’t have had the same gravitas. Goodell even turned in a decent performance as himself, not just announcing the picks but also interacting with the NFL cameos and Frank Langella’s character in the green room.

7 Wrong: The Fans Cheering Roger Goodell

It has become a tradition in the NFL Draft for fans to greet Commissioner Goodell with a cavalcade of boos at the start of the draft, and when he announces picks, it’s to the point where Goodell has even sarcastically embraced it.

In the movie however, Goodell approaches the podium to cheers, which admittedly felt like something out of The Twilight Zone. Perhaps Reitman should have reviewed footage of the previous drafts. While the film is essentially a glorified commercial for the NFL and the film’s premise is somewhat absurd, the least the director could have done was get that one small detail about fan behavior at the draft correct.

6 Right: The Split Screens

One of the more interesting cinematography elements was the use of split screens during the phone conversations. What was interesting was the element where the characters seemed to “bleed” onto the other side of the screen, almost as if they were having a face-to-face conversation instead of being hundreds of miles away.

Reitman claimed in a 2014 interview with Mandatory that he believed he had pioneered a new approach to split screens, and while that approach has not made appearances in any other films of note, the idea behind it is certainly was groundbreaking for its time and it’s a shame it’s not more widely used.

5 Wrong: Overexposition

One of the core tenets of filmmaking is the idea of “Show, don’t tell”. Now to be fair, the NFL Draft is a hard story to show, much less tell, because there are multiple angles to the story. However, a lot of the scenes in Draft Day felt like information dumps more than anything else.

Obviously the idea is to get non-football fans up to speed assuming they did go and see the movie, but dedicating prolonged amounts of screen time to analysts overexplaining things that could happen in the draft, but ultimately didn’t felt like padding more than anything else. At times it felt like the movie was lecturing the audience. We didn’t need to know about how teams can leapfrog other teams if they take too long to pick, and we certainly didn’t need to know that players can fall in the draft.

4 Right: Getting The NFL’s Blessing

While this movie did come across as a 110 minute commercial for the NFL, it was admittedly nice to see the real teams, logos, facilities and the actual NFL Draft location being used as opposed to lawyer-friendly alternatives, like in Any Given Sunday and The Replacements and The Gameplan. 

Because the league did give its blessing, Reitman was able to capture, for the most part, the authenticity of the fanbases of the teams involved, especially the Browns and the Seattle Seahawks, who were the featured teams in the movie. Apparently also, the filming was done right before the start of Day 2 of the 2013 Draft, so actual fans and team personnel were there to shoot.

3 Wrong: The Lack Of Communication

One of the more frustrating elements of the movie was the lack of clear communication between the organizational decision makers: the GM, coach and owner. After Molina tells Sonny that he needs him to make a splash, rather than relay that information to his coworkers thus explaining his decision making, Sonny decides to take matters into his own hands.

The conflict feels completely unnecessary. Sonny never explains to his contemporaries his draft strategy, a key part of drafting by the way, and as a result he’s treated with undeserved disdain, not only from his coach but also his incumbent quarterback. When he does reveal his draft strategy, to draft Vontae Mack no matter what, it nearly costs him his job and plunges everything into chaos.

2 Right: The Casting

Ivan Reitman has a knack for casting the right people, and Draft Day is no exception. Kevin Costner playing Browns GM Sonny Weaver worked because of his background in sports movies. Jennifer Garner’s performance gave a lot of weight and credibility to her role as a salary cap expert and Sonny’s love interest. Chadwick Boseman playing an athlete was actually the norm before he became Black Panther, and some of the more minor roles, including Frank Langella as Browns owner Al Molina and Terry Crews as Earl Jennings make the movie work.

The only miss seemed to be Griffin Newman as the intern, in fact he felt ancillary to the film entirely. Still, the cast definitely elevated the movie from forgettable to at least watchable.

1 Wrong: The Trades

Probably the worst part of the film and the most frequent target of derision were the trades that were made. The first trade that Sonny made involved him massively overpaying for the number one pick: three first rounders to the Seattle Seahawks to move up six spots. The second trade Sonny made involved him swindling the Jacksonville Jaguars, trading three second round picks for their sixth overall pick. Finally, Sonny gets his picks back by trading the sixth pick to the Seahawks for the first rounders he traded originally AND a punt returner named David Putney.

To be fair, nobody is calling Reitman a football expert, but he could have at least consulted Jimmy Johnson’s draft pick valuation formula before writing those trade ideas into the script.

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