On Saturday, Michael Sam made
sports history by becoming the first openly gay athlete taken in a professional
sports draft, taken 249th overall by the St. Louis Rams. While he’s
not the first openly gay athlete (or even the second; before Jason Collins,
there was Glenn Burke1), his draft is a milestone because teams
knew about him going into the draft, whereas both Collins and Burke only
officially came out after established careers in their respective leagues.
This is huge news. No longer do
the headlines and pundits simply claim that America is ready for gay athletes,
Sam’s draft line shows that, indeed, at least one team in one league is
emphatically stating that it does not care about his sexual preference. But let’s
get one thing straight before we jump on that bandwagon: This is not the most
important storyline here.
Michael Sam was a stalwart for a
lights-out Missouri defense, and he helped lead that team to an SEC
championship in its second year of contention in the league. He was voted
co-defensive player of the year in that league. He was, initially, projected to
go as high as the third round2. While there were other exemplary
players who actually did go undrafted, like Tennessee’s Antonio Richardson (who
had been an early second-round projection) and Texas’ Jordan Jeffcoat (who was
the Big 12’s defensive player of the year), those players tended to have
legitimate reasons for their slide: fears of injury.
When your skill set is either
being huge or being fast, any kind of leg injury raises a huge red flag, and it’s
completely understandable that these players slid out of the draft; it happens
every year. However, for Sam, there was no such red flag. Instead, there was a
rainbow flag. For all of Goodell’s praises for Sam earlier in the year and all
the GM’s who followed suit, in reality, teams were scared to touch Sam. Scared
of what might happen to their team if they brought a gay man into the most
macho of locker rooms. So he slid. And he slid. Right down to the point where
Missouri’s own St. Louis Rams burned their seventh-round pick, their Mr.
Irrelevant, on Sam. And while I commend the Rams’ ownership and Jeff Fisher for
making that move and for accepting the repercussions of what might come if they
have to cut Sam, it’s clear that this was a PR move.
Sam is expected to make the transition
to defensive end in the NFL, a position that the Rams absolutely did not need
to fill. Drafting Aaron Donald in the first round stacked an already impressive
line that featured the likes of Robert Quinn and Chris Long, and it’s incredibly
unlikely that the Rams will have room for Sam, even if he turns out to be a
major NFL talent, simply because the Rams’ defensive line might be the best in football.
For that reason, the idea that the Rams would actually spend a pick, even in
the last round, on a defensive end because they actually need to is silly.
So what we have now is a huge
story about how America has finally come to terms with the idea of
homosexuality, so much so that an openly gay man was drafted by the manliest of
all American sports. And in the midst spreading that story, we ignore the fact
that Sam slid four rounds in the draft and we have no clear explanation of why
he did. Why would the defensive player of the year in college’s toughest
league, who racked up 19 tackles-for-loss and 11.5 sacks against many future NFL
offensive lineman, fall so far in the draft?
Poor combine? As if. Keeping in
mind that Sam is a converted linebacker, his bench press was weaker than all
but UCLA’s Cassius March for defensive linemen. How did March do? Why, he went
in the fourth round to the Seahawks3, who might just have the best
defensive scouts in the league. His 4.91-second 40-yard-dash? Faster than
multiple defensive lineman who were taken on Saturday. On top of that, we’ve
got history to go on. The last seven defensive players of the year for the SEC
have been selected to the Pro Bowl a
combined 11 times and have been named first-team All-Pros eight times.4
The last DPOY drafted outside the first round? 2006, when Demeco Ryans slid all
the way to the fourth round.5 He’s currently enjoying an extremely
successful career with the Philadelphia Eagles.
All this goes to say that there
is absolutely no reason for Sam to slide to the status of Mr. Irrelevant, and
that should be the story we’re talking about here, not that the Rams actually
did take them or that ESPN showed two men kissing on live TV. That a team
objectively looked at drafting Sam from a PR standpoint and said, “This is a
good move. We should do it,” is a victory of sorts. Twenty years ago, I highly
doubt that any team would’ve made that move. But that was a step in the right
direction; it doesn’t mean the race is over. And until a player of Sam’s
caliber actually gets drafted at the position that he merits, professional
sports still has at least one more hill to climb.
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