Let the games begin - 2003 Draft Preview

Football Digest, June, 2003

WHAT MAKES THE NFL SO great? George Young, the late general manager for the New York Giants, once summed it up this way: The NFL sells hope.

Hope. That word certainly can be applied to the draft--especially these days, when teams like the St. Louis Rams and New England Patriots can go from worst to first in a matter of months.

The draft creates almost as much of a buzz as the games themselves. Long-suffering fans in places like Cincinnati and Arizona can point to it and say, "Maybe this is the year things finally will turn around." And fans of teams on the cusp of greatness--teams like the Philadelphia Eagles and San Francisco 49ers--view it as a chance to get over the hump.

Charting the prospects has become a year-round happening--it's something of a cottage industry, in fact. Analysts such as Mel Kiper Jr. and the late Joel Buchsbaum turned the draft into careers for themselves, and ESPN provides wall-to-wall coverage of the proceedings, from Rounds 1 through 7.

As you'll see in our following special section, we also hit the draft hard. We kick off with a profile on USC quarterback Carson Palmer, this year's likely No. 1 selection. We talk to a number of coaches and personnel gurus who opine on whether Palmer has what it lakes to succeed in the NFL.

From there, we dissect the top prospects at every position--hundreds of players in all. By draft day, names like Jimmy Kennedy and Charles Rogers should be as familiar to you as Warren Sapp and Terrell Owens. We then look at the needs of all 32 teams and some of the prospects they're identifying.

Our special section concludes with a feature examining how one failed draft can cause the wheels to come off of a franchise. We included this story so that we could hammer home the importance of the draft.

This may be the offseason, but it sure doesn't feel like it--not with the draft on the horizon.

* WHEN April 26-27

* WHERE New York; The Theater at Madison Square Garden

* TELEVISION Saturday (Rounds 1-3): ESPN, noon-7 pm.(EST); ESPN2, 7 p.m.-conclusion

Sunday (Rounds 4-7): ESPN, 11 a.m.-1 p.m.; ESPN2,1 p.m.-conclusion