Seahawks GM/Hardo John Schneider Had Walls Ripped Out of His House to Install 25 TVs for the Draft

Source - It’s going to be the most unusual NFL draft ever.

John Schneider has broken-down walls and two-dozen new screens inside his home to prove it.

“(I live in) not a great area in terms of wifi and cell service and everything,” the Seahawks general manager said Tuesday while on a Zoom call from his suburban Seattle house—the one that will be his draft home this week. ...

“I’m not going to lie to you; I’ve had a couple walls ripped up and had people in my house working on that. You know, it’s just part of the process. In the time of trying to be social distancing, it’s definitely been a challenge." ...

ESPN’s Dianna Russini reported at least one NFL coach said he got kicked off the league’s practice draft testing the remote communications this week. How’d that happen? His kids were on their iPads using up his wifi connection.

Far be it for me to tell a guy who built two conference champions and a Super Bowl winner how to do his job, but Whiskey Tango Foxtrot. Is he trying to find a replacement for Jadeveon Clowney or land a SpaceX launch vehicle? 

Seriously, what is a guy with wifi problems doing tearing out walls to installing more screens than Smart Tech?

I cut the cable last Fall and with a college freshman home full time, I'm putting everything I'm not using on Airplane Mode because I live in mortal fear I won't be able to get through a 30 minute episode of "Barry" without being subjected to the dreaded spinning buffering dots. Schneider is a guy whose livelihood depends on his connectivity and he's gutting his house out to the load-bearing walls to put in enough TVs to launch a dozen Middle East drone strikes.

Again, who am I to question his judgment? Other than a guy who has been drafting Fantasy teams since the mid-80s. I am not making that up. I've been in a league with more or less the same group of guys since we were calculating our points by hand from the Monday morning box scores and I was scoring Bo Jackson in a trade in a bar on Thanksgiving morning. And while that doesn't mean I know a thing about building an NFL roster, it does make me an expert on having too much information at your disposal. In all these years I've never once been to a draft (we still prefer to do it in person, around a table filled with beers) where there wasn't one guy grinding everything to a halt by being over-prepared. He's that guy with the three different mock draft printouts and the $9 magazine he bought at CVS that he has to cross-reference every time he's on the clock. So when he's not throwing sand on the ice of the proceedings by not being read when it's his turn, he's trying to draft someone who was already taken while he was combing through reams of useless data. 

I can't help but think Schneider is guilty of overkill on this one, and it's going to cost him. Dearly. Mark my words, at some point he's going to forfeit a pick because he'll be scrambling to figure out who said what or why screens 8 through 11 are frozen and and 22's sound isn't synced up with the picture. 

Someone should've reminded him that Al Davis built an empire using a rotary phone. One that might or might not have been the kind where you hold the receiver up to your ear and talk into the cone on the base. Or that Bill Belichick can't reset the clock in his car for Daylight Savings Time but he got Julian Edelman in the seventh round. With two dozen fewer TVs in the room than Schneider will have. So good luck, tech hardo. I hope ripping your house apart to have Mission Control installed helps. But I seriously doubt it will.