Is Mel Kiper Jr. the ideal all college sports journalists should strive for?
With spring fast approaching, the days are getting longer and the first signs of life are bursting from the ground. These things are great, but for pro football fans springtime means only one thing: the NFL Draft.
And with one of the league’s marquee events (to be aired on ESPN from April 26-28) comes one of football’s most recognizable personalities: Mel Kiper Jr.
Kiper’s square jaw-line and Trojan helmet growth of hair commands ESPN air time from the months leading up to the draft to the weeks after Roger Gooddell calls out the last draftee’s name.
Kiper’s presence and expertise has elicited a variable range of opinions, but student sports journalists see both positives and negatives in Kiper’s work -- although some are hesitant to call him a journalist.
“He’s an expert,” University of Maryland senior broadcast major Daniel Baker says. “I don’t know if I would consider him a journalist, but he studies the Hell out of the Draft. He’s an expert for good reason.”
Like some of ESPN’s other notorious personalities, Kiper’s mainstay presence on SportsCenter and bombastic delivery make him a target for criticism. Detractors have a laundry list of complaints against the Baltimore native: he’s too cushy with NFL agents and their clients; he never played professional football and his rankings are completely arbitrary.
While all theories are speculative, Baker -- who wants to become a play-by-play announcer one day -- highlights what he thinks to be Kiper’s greatest contribution to the sports media community.
“He’s self-made,” he says. “It’s that American Dream, so to speak. You can make something of yourself through hard work, putting in the time and knowing what you’re talking about -- and communicating it well.”
Depending on one’s interpretation of the American Dream, Kiper achieved it. He grew up a Baltimore Colts fan and got his start assembling draft packets, which eventually grew into a published book in 1979.
Kiper impressed ESPN executives with his particular niche and joined their Draft coverage team in 1983. He’s covered the event for the outlet ever since and Baker notes that aspiring sports journalists shouldn’t underestimate this accomplishment.
“Kiper didn’t come up in the quote-on-quote ‘age of information,’” he says. “It was a Hell of a lot harder to do stuff. He’s important because he’s managed to still affect a league that pulls in billions in profit every year.”
ESPN editor Chris Sprow has worked with Kiper for the past two years, helping to assemble Kiper’s trademark Draft Big Board. Sprow remembers a particular conversation he had with Kiper about former University of Wisconsin linebacker O’Brien Schofield’s draft prospects that lend weight to Kiper’s journalistic credibility.
“Mel hadn’t seen a lot of him, so he tells me, ‘lemme make some calls,’” Sprow says. “He gave me a call back within the hour and said he talked to [University of Iowa head football coach Kirk] Ferentz. Ferentz mentioned they couldn’t stop him when they played Wisconsin. We ended up moving him up to the #4 OLB spot on the Big Board.”
To Sprow, Kiper’s definitely a journalist with the skills to back it up. Even after gaining acclaim as the “Draft guy,” he mentions that Kiper’s remained humble enough to not just rely on his instincts. He still works his phone and contact sources.
“He’s tireless,” he says. “He is opinionated, but he’s not in a cave. He’s always looking to pick scouts’ and coaches’ brains and I think that’s why personnel trust him: he’s very engaged.”
Recent Ohio State University graduate Ben Axelrod refrains from grouping Kiper into that distinction of “journalist.” He sees the lack of objectivity in Kiper’s work as the limiting factor that prevents Kiper from attaining that label.
“I think he and [ESPN Draft analyst Todd McShay] are ‘scouts’ who give their opinions,” he says. “They’re forced to take hard-line stances on things and say, ‘this is a fact, it’s not opinion.’ ‘It’s a fact that Andrew Luck is the best prospect since Peyton Manning.’ So when you do that it’s not a fact because it’s not provable.”
Axelrod raises an important point: when evaluating players, what is fact and what isn’t?
Besides the varying titles Baker and Axelrod apply to Kiper, both have trouble assessing whether Kiper’s finished product -- after diligent research -- warrants journalistic credibility through objectivity and fairness.
Maybe it isn’t objective, but that comes with predicting how hundreds of potential college athletes will fair in the NFL. Axelrod notes that the ambiguous nature of Kiper’s product might also be because of ESPN itself.
“The thing that baffles me is people are outraged, but the first letter in ESPN stands for ‘entertainment,’” Axelrod says. “They definitely do a good job reporting, but the biggest stories that have broken in sports in the past year haven’t been by ESPN—they’ve been by Yahoo!, Fox Sports and student newspapers.”
So he is and isn’t a journalist. Despite the confusion, would Baker or Axelrod want to do what he’s doing right now?
“Could I envision myself being in a more ‘entertainment’ role on ESPN?” Baker asks. “I’d do it in a heartbeat.”
Ditto for Axelrod.
“The idea behind these guys creates jobs, so yeah,” he says. “A job is the sort of thing I need right now.”
Ryan Joseph is a Spring 2012 USA TODAY Collegiate Correspondent. Learn more about him here.
This story originally appeared on the USA TODAY College blog, a news source produced for college students by student journalists. The blog closed in September of 2017.