The Rise and Fall of The Draft Network
In 2018, a draft analysis website launched with the intention of improving NFL draft coverage. It changed the industry. And now it seems to be disappearing. What happened?
From 2011 to 2014, a loose network of young draft enthusiasts known as “Draft Twitter” emerged from the online football space. Draft Twitter represented a paradigm shift, refocusing the conversation around the NFL draft around in-depth analysis and skepticism rather than sourcing and traditional reporting.
They were primarily a young group of analysts but what they lacked in training, they more than made up for with an overabundance of energy and enthusiasm.
Draft Twitter produced writers, analysts and even front office personnel scattered across the media and football landscape, with members in positions inside flagship publications like the Ringer, ESPN, the Athletic and Sports Illustrated, college all-star games like the NFLPA Bowl and Shrine Bowl and even football leagues like the AFL, AAF, USFL, XFL and the NFL.
Along the way, one website splashed onto the scene that ended up having an enormous impact. Despite a limited staff, The Draft Network would turn out some juggernauts in the industry, placing writers and analysts at the Ringer, Pro Football Focus and ESPN within just a few years of launching.
That website, once a centerpiece of third-party draft analysis, now seems to be on the verge of shutting down. Wide Left spent three months digging deep into the story to find out the answer to one question.
What happened?
“Have you ever seen the Hulu series The Dropout? Elizabeth Holmes. Theranos. She’s running a fugazi company. That is what I compare Paige Dimakos to… I think she’s genuinely a crook.”
As Draft Twitter grew in stature, it wasn't just niche enthusiasts taking note. Football media was about to undergo a sea change, and talent-hungry eyes were turning in Draft Twitter's direction. For a core group of prestige analysts and journalists, what happened was more bizarre than anything that even grizzled media veterans could have predicted.
Wide Left called lawyers, read court documents, talked to dozens of current and former employees, contacted spurned vendors and pulled at threads. In just six short years, The Draft Network featured everything from power plays and Brazilian tech firms, to missing paychecks and a one-of-a-kind mural of vintage smut.
However, Wide Left did not talk to CEO Paige Dimakos. After emails to two different addresses, direct messages to three accounts on two different social media platforms and a text message to a number confirmed to belong to Dimakos, Wide Left received no response.
In this piece:
How The Draft Network Changed the Landscape of Draft Content
The Draft Network Gets Sued For Hundreds of Thousands of Dollars
The Draft Network Gets Started
When Draft Twitter was getting off the ground, they produced a melange of websites, largely hosted on platforms like WordPress and Blogger. Some of them are still around today, but most evaporated into the ether. It was difficult to sustain, and there weren’t many successful business models.
Out of the ashes of one of those foundational sites emerged a more modern publication that would change how draft analysis would be conducted and helped set the stage for how new media would cover the draft.
On July 2nd, 2018, over 30,000 fans of the NFL draft found out that they were following a Twitter account called DraftNetworkLLC, much to their surprise. That account tweeted that they were going to launch their website on August 6th, announcing who they were and what they offered.
They explained pretty quickly that they had acquired the Twitter account for a website called DraftBreakdown, which posted broadcast footage from college football games cut to focus on a draft prospect – every play from a quarterback or every snap that a defensive lineman was on the field.
This account, and its attached website, was a godsend for would-be and up-and-coming draft analysts, who would come to rely on the site and the breakdowns embedded there via YouTube to perform their analysis.
It would be no exaggeration to say that DraftBreakdown became a staple in the early Draft Twitter community, enabled by thousands of hours of volunteer work from devotees willing to share cutups of draft prospects, even obscure players who weren’t projected to be drafted and ultimately weren’t.
The site was, of course, illegal.
After repeated takedowns from rightsholders of college football footage, it became difficult for a website like DraftBreakdown to exist – especially without anything definitively transformative about the cutups, which contained no analysis or commentary from the editors.
So DraftBreakdown floundered, and an essential tool for third-party draft analysis was shuttered. Eventually, a black market for college cutups – this time containing access to All-22 footage – formed. But before any of that could happen, there was a Twitter account with a sizable following, especially from draft media, that couldn’t do anything.
It linked to a dead website.
At the same time, JC Cornell and Trevor Sikkema were building a team of draft analysts for a website that would combine mock draft simulation with on-the-ready access to scouting reports. While scouting reports and draft simulators were nothing new, combining them in a slick format looked like it could be a differentiating factor in an increasingly crowded market.
Sikkema had been cohosting an extremely popular draft podcast, Locked On NFL Draft, with his good friend Jon Ledyard. Ledyard, like most members of Draft Twitter, had his fingers in many pies. In addition to the podcast, he’d been doing work covering the Pittsburgh Steelers for scout.com while also doing prospect scouting work for a website called NDT Scouting, headed up by Kyle Crabbs and Joe Marino.
Sikkema and Ledyard had been discussing ideas for a draft-oriented site for some time and this was an opportunity for Sikkema to pitch that concept to someone with the ability to realize that dream.
So, over beers, Sikkema and Cornell hammered out the details of the potential site. Many of the items from Sikkema and Ledyard’s original planning document ended up being core pieces of the site, including what ended up being the centerpiece of the company’s content plan – the Mock Draft Machine.
But first, they needed to recruit some talent. Sikkema was familiar with Crabbs and Marino through Ledyard. Not only did Crabbs have his own company, NDT Scouting – originally called NFL Draft Tracker – he and Marino cohosted the other wildly popular Locked On draft-oriented podcast called Draft Dudes.
Marino and Crabbs were also producing content for FanRag, a popular site that had been straddling the hard-to-define line between blog and traditional online publication.
Cornell contacted the owners of the DraftBreakdown Twitter account to see if something could be worked out. In his words, the Draft Network wanted to provide value to fans of the draft needing more content and missing out on what DraftBreakdown provided.
After hearing about the plans that the Draft Network had, the owners of the DraftBreakdown account agreed to turn over the account and its valuable follower count if they provided a sizable donation to the Wounded Warriors Foundation, which they happily did.
So DraftBreakdown became DraftNetworkLLC, which later became TheDraftNetwork. A cynic may have argued that buying unearned followers was cheating the game and that claim may hold some weight, but TDN was upfront about what they did and provided relevant content to the target audience.
“Getting The Draft Network handle, that was something that I pitched … very early on. The reason why a lot of startup businesses or startup websites failed, is because they can't get off the ground quick enough. You know, there's that cool initial interest, but then there's not really a lot of fire after that,” One founder told Wide Left. “And we looked at the Draft Breakdown Twitter account, specifically, because [the] plan was kind of built around social media presence.”
After details were worked out, the four of them met with Cornell in Florida. As one of them put it, “We went to Sarasota and had a brainstorming session. We walked out of that session with a company.”
That meeting turned into another meeting, this time with Brian Cornell, the CEO of Target, and JC’s father. That led to The Draft Network, with the five founders — the four writers and JC, the chief executive — each holding equity in the company and the Cornells providing funding to get the site off the ground.
After finalizing the arrangement, they finished out their staff with two more additions: Brad Kelly and Benjamin Solak, both of whom were active in Draft Twitter. JC Cornell would work on the business angle while the six others provided content.
The Mock Draft Machine — Building An Edge
By the time they had conceived of the idea, the 2018 NFL Draft had already run its course, so they set their sights on preparing for the college season – watch lists, team needs, too-early mock drafts and so on.
They released a flurry of content on day one and kept up with the hectic schedule. Within a month, they had produced over 300 written pieces of content, or ten pieces a day. They were also driving traffic to the site through the Mock Draft Machine, originally through a developer named SavvyApps.
At the time, Pro Football Focus and Pro Football Network had not launched their machines and the NFL Mock Draft Database was not yet online. Places like FanSpeak and first-pick.com – the second of which is now defunct – had working simulators but, at the time, had an older user interface reminiscent of a bygone era of the internet.
Trades were difficult and there was no way to learn about an unknown player inside of the website.
TDN’s machine resolved to fix that through their own scouting reports and external web development team. They also offered users the opportunity to create their own Big Boards – and to use those boards inside the simulator.
On top of that, their UI advantages extended beyond a mock draft simulator – draft prospect information, like measurables and key biographical information, were easier to read on the site than on sites like nfldraftscout.com, now draftscout.com.
Because of the unique nature of the NFL draft, they had to pay a little more out of pocket for an American development team – one that was familiar enough with football that they didn’t need to learn what a trade was, or why positional designations were important.
The simulator had a trade function and made it trivially simple to pull up an in-window scouting report on any player in the draft. This original feature gave it an edge in the market, allowing users to cut down on extraneous clicks and opening up a wealth of new browser tabs.
What’s more, the user interface was modern, compelling and slick. The website felt good.
The Mock Draft Machine, while not the first on the market, changed the draft conversation across the industry. Now, with a simple way to produce mock drafts, fans became a bigger part of the conversation – and content creators needed to be aware of this.
The machine was the draw, but the content was the anchor. And they were almost producing too much of it.
Writers were beginning to step on each other’s toes – beginning to write one feature before realizing another on the same subject had already been published. Some days would have virtually no new content while another day found the site flooded with new articles, with the first pieces to publish buried at the bottom.
Aside from Cornell’s position as the CEO, no one had taken on formal roles in the company. That needed to change. Ledyard, who had anticipated the problem and had begun messaging writers to better coordinate content, functionally operated as COO – over time, he was given the title of COO, though primarily worked on internal operations.
“I just don't think that [Paige Dimakos] knew how to handle adversity. I think that was a problem. When it twisted, she didn't know who to ask for help, how to get help. I don't think she was honest about what was going on...”
“And, you know, one day it all explodes in her face, but it was a slow leak. It was a slow leak. And I think when everything's going great, I think she's awesome. But the adversity that came, I think she made too many catastrophic mistakes for it to survive.”
His natural inclination for organization as well as his frustration with the operation slotted him into the position. It wasn’t long until he started coordinating through the use of multiple spreadsheets and a Google calendar, with regular check-ins among the other writers.
“He was deliberate about, ‘OK what we can produce, who can produce it, whose responsibilities are what?’,” said one employee.
The Draft Network replicated the all-too-familiar tension found in startups, where the lack of formal roles undermined the operation of the team, primarily composed of content creators. The fact that they were already friends exacerbated those tensions.
The need for accountability clashed with the geniality usually needed to keep friendships intact. Deepening the divide was the fact that they were all remote workers in an age before remote work was the norm. Communication was difficult and incomplete.
Still, content was being produced, the website was getting eyeballs and deals were being made. The website had a premium option that allowed users to save their mock drafts or use more features – and subscriptions were selling.
But there were issues. Disagreements about the direction of the company emerged. As one approach was decided, a new one was imposed. And it very much seemed like Cornell and the writers had different ideas altogether about what style of content would sell.
“We wanted to be grinders. I wanted to be that,” said one employee. Instead, as decisions were made to produce a consistent flow – Mock Draft Mondays, regular scouting reports, and so on – decisions would come down from Cornell that contradicted their in-depth vision.
The deals weren’t as impressive as the writers originally thought they would be, either. Despite their sudden reach and consistent traffic, they couldn’t find many big-name sponsors willing to shell out money.
As one founder put it, “We were being told [that] JC was having meetings with Pizza Hut, Coca-Cola, Dominos and all this stuff. And these meetings ‘went great,’ but nothing ever happened to these meetings, because it turns out the meetings were not going great.”
The Draft Network Takes Off, And Nearly Stumbles
Those were concerns, but they were secondary. January validated their efforts as the 2019 draft season ramped up – the Mock Draft Machine was pulling in hundreds of thousands of users and the future was looking up.
They had new content plans in the works too, including a livestream for draft events like the Senior Bowl, NFL Combine and, naturally, the draft itself. But the staff was primarily composed of writers without much on-camera experience. They needed a host to facilitate their on-screen presence.
Crabbs and Marino had worked with Paige Dimakos at FanRag, which had been in dire straits. They contacted her to help run their draft show at the Senior Bowl and things went off swimmingly. Not only could she run the show smoothly and had experience with the difficulties of livestreaming, she had contacts through her family that would allow them to secure sponsorships.
“I think [Paige Dimakos] just peddled a lot of BS.”
Their live coverage at the Senior Bowl was sponsored by Mercedes-Benz Corporate Sales, a pretty good get for such a new media outlet.
The Draft Network was rapidly ascending, and the combination of their whirlwind output, high-quality content and excellent production value made them a good bet. But they hit an obstacle – old tweets from Ledyard resurfaced, retweeted by the account The Draft Network had acquired from Draft Breakdown.
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