Ticket Policy Makes NFL Draft Not Worth The Trip

By Broadside Assistant Sports Editor Danny Hotochin

Every spring, the NFL Draft offers hope for every professional football fan across the nation, continent and world.

Whether you root for the 18-1 New England Patriots or the 1-15 Miami Dolphins, the draft gives fan bases from all over, a reason to believe in their teams after a two-day period in which franchises build for the future with promising college prospects.

Given the circumstances that surround the draft, the event sounds like a can’t-miss event for NFL fans to witness live, right? One would think so, being that so much emotion is exuded from the fans present at Radio City Music Hall at every draft — you know who you are, Jets fans.

So, three friends and I made the drive up to New York City in an effort to watch the event from a vantage point other than a television set — which we decided to do a week prior to the draft — and it seemed like a fine concept at the time.

Rather than to view it comfortably from the confines of a couch, the decision to make the trip out to the draft didn’t turn out to be such a smart idea for many reasons.

If you’re like me and you live too far from New York to make a one-day trip to the draft, then you’d probably have to book a hotel for a night or two in order to enjoy yourself and the event, and even that process becomes a pain.

Because we decided rather hastily about attending the event, the cheapest, and nearest, hotel available was a Howard Johnson in Newark, N.J., but this problem could be avoided if you were to devise your draft plans months in advance.

However, securing a room that was in the vicinity of the draft was a cake walk compared to what we endured next.

After completing a six-hour drive to Newark—in mid-day traffic on a Friday on the Jersey Turnpike, which added about two to three hours to the trip, the day before the draft—we agreed to take a trip into the city for a little sight-seeing after arriving in New Jersey at approximately 7 p.m. before camping out for tickets, as we planned to begin to wait in line early the next morning.

Shortly after taking a train from Jersey to NYC at about 9 p.m., we then took a cab to the Radio City Music Hall just to check out any potential ruckus or crowd of any kind. To our disbelief, there were about 40 to 50 people already standing in line for the draft, and it was only 9:45 p.m..

Feeling that we would miss out on tickets if we didn’t act quickly, we collectively decided that we should begin to take our place in line, thus igniting one of the most boring and unfulfilling experiences of my life.

For the next 12 to 13 hours, we waited from 10 p.m. to 10 a.m. as each person in our group took turns going to the bathroom and getting food and drinks. Keep in mind that we had a hotel room waiting back in Jersey that we didn’t even get to use for that night. Waiting in line for that long was the most excruciatingly time-consuming and mind-numbing experience that I’ve ever endured.

That was only the half of my pain, because what I’m about to explain is the NFL’s draft ticket policy.

Even though the tickets for the show are free, those that wait in line the night before are rewarded with a wristband rather than an a ticket, as Radio City Music Hall personnel men and women remind you that you aren’t even guaranteed a good seat despite showing up and nice and early.

Now how does that make sense—you make people wait in line for almost half a day, and you don’t even reward those in the front portion of the line with good seats?

Being that about 600 to 800 people were behind us in line, we and the people around us felt cheated about this nonsense, but the only thing we could do was to try and get back to RCMH before they started seating people at 1 p.m..

After we finally got our clearance to enter the draft, we all decided to head back to our hotel room in Newark for some showers, a decent meal and some R&R, as sitting and waiting on a New York City sidewalk will tend to make one feel extremely hungry and dirty.

However, because of some ill-advised directions from the front desk at the Howard Johnson, we couldn’t find our way back to our hotel, forcing us to make a giant U-turn back to the city in order for us to catch the draft in time.

Because of the delay, we didn’t arrive at RCMH until 2:45, and you could imagine the type of seats we got stuck with—we were one of the first people in line and we were shoved to the nose bleed section.

However, we at least made it in time to see every first-round selection, but we only stayed until the 20th pick in the second round before deciding to conclude our NFL Draft adventure.

Every year that I’ve watched the draft from my house, I’ve always thought to myself, how cool it would be to view it from the balconies of RCMH?

And now that I’ve actually done it, I couldn’t regret the decision any more than I do now. It’s not worth dealing with the long wait in line, the New Yorkers in attendance and the excessive trash talk, as you would imagine, after hour 11 the jokes get kind of old, only to have your excitement about the draft dwindle to utter exhaustion.

After failing to sleep for 38-straight hours, the only hope I had for some peace of mind at that point was the thought of a soft pillow, a clean set of clothes and a comforting drive back to Virginia.