Getting your Trinity Audio player ready...

For whatever reason Thursday night, I grabbed an adult beverage, sat in front of the TV and realized some of the things that are wrong in sports these days.

Check that, I watched the entire first round of the NFL draft.

Going in I had no vested interest in where any of these players went and I really couldn’t care less to hear about who one college player was wearing and who blinged out Crocs. Seriously, some player wore jewels on their Crocs and it leads me to think that their might be a common sense problem.

Or I have no fashion sense.

Maybe I should put some fake gems on some furry slippers and see where that gets me.

Still, as I watched I started to note certain issues that could have an impact on younger athletes who suddenly see stars in their eyes every time someone tells a high school athlete that they can play Division I athletics.

They start to see NIL money, fame and glory and push to the side their own ideas of their talent because they want to be a person putting on the hat of a professional football team in a mirror dressed in hundreds of dollars worth of clothing.

It might be easy to forget the reality that only a handful of college kids drafted into professional sports will see playing time that first year or even second and third years and more than that, gone is the realistic view that an incredibly small number of kids coming out of high school will ever play college sports in the first place, a number that drops dramatically when you consider how many will play Division I athletics.

It would be easy to cast partial blame to a variety of places and people that contribute to a student-athlete’s views of their own talent, but most certainly we have to train our eyes to our own profession for some of that blame.

The media is notorious for setting standards and projecting them on kids who see their names on TV or in newspapers, hyped to a point where it bolsters their own views of where they think they might be.

As journalists, we have to take some kind of responsibility in how these student-athletes portray themselves and what they think their future might look like.

At the same time, we have to be responsible enough to not destroy dreams either, which paradoxically can work into that first point. It’s perfectly fine to laud an athlete at any level for achievements so long as we don’t put them on a pedestal that often can’t be realized because we just don’t know what the future projects.

Unfortunately, we saw none of that restraint on the first night, or even all the way through the draft, by national media who seemed intent on making sure we knew which athletes would play on Day 1, where they would play or when they would even play.

They throw out numbers, stats, examples and expect that a 22-year-old is going to immediately play in a world of professionals. This, in turn, can bring things back to a player who buys into their own greatness — saying and doing things that cast them in a light of overconfidence and sometimes even arrogance.

We’re often fixated on once again projecting greatness to a singular point when we have no idea what the future holds. It’s a lesson that every athlete coming up should be able to take with them to whatever that next level is going to be.

I would dare to say that a grounded future is more ideal with the possibility of playing a sport or game only a select few will get to do. A well-rounded personality that can accept what life gives a person through hard work and realism.

We don’t need a culture of self-importance that intentionally or unintentionally places importance on one person rather than a team, which can be particularly damaging in high school.

But this shouldn’t be a complete doom and gloom morality tale on how to handle the spotlight, because there was one remarkably heartwarming aspect to the draft that while talked about hasn’t been talked about enough in my opinion.

With each name called in the draft there was one player that greeted every single player on the way out in a way that could have caused a person to think they were good friends or even brothers.

I noticed it sparsely at first, but started paying more attention as the first round went on. Maxwell Hairston made sure each player walking past him knew how special this moment was, showing genuine and enthusiastic happiness as he hugged each player drafted before he was taken by the Buffalo Bills.

These are the types of things that should be celebrated more and should be a lighthouse for athletes making their mark on the world. For some, it might have been a little thing, but in a world where media members are wondering what an entire team should do for a single player to win something, this was a beam of light sweeping over everything.