Draftbots

 The NFL Draft begins Thursday evening, and I for one can't wait to see which team picks Dr. Miguelito Loveless, ace running back out of (choose college here). Or maybe it's Courtney Love. Or maybe ...

Ah, heck. See, I've been consulting AI again. And this is what it's spitting back at me:

Love Boat is very fast according to most measurable analytics, and should be drafted either by the Tennessee Large Mythical Humanoids, the New York Combustible Gases or the Arizona Small Red Birds -- known in colloquial terms as the Titans, the Jets and the Cardinals ... 

And OK, OK. So we're really talking about Jeremiyah Love from Notre Dame here. But we're also talking about AI, which the Blob loathes with every microbe in his body because A) he's a writer, and B) I have seen "The Terminator" umpteen times, and I know Skynet when I see it. 

By this I mean the machines are coming for us, and they're nothing like Ah-nold or even the Robert Patrick upgrade. This generation of Terminators is doing something far more destructive.

They're "writing" sports stories.

As an old sports scribe, I find this both hysterically funny and absolutely disgusting, because machines cannot now and never will be able to "write." Ain't no Steinbecks, Hemingways or Faulkners among the machines, boys and girls. Think the Robert Patrick Terminator could ever come up with Faulkner's epic 175-word run-on sentence about Pickett's Charge in "Intruder In The Dust"? Get outta here.

That's not the worst of it, though. Because now I find at least one NFL team is using AI to help evaluate talent for the draft.

"And you don't need to be expert!" gushes general manager John Lynch of the 49ers, the team in question.

(Which is hilarious, if you think about it, because John Lynch, as GM, is supposed to be one of the "experts". So it's kinda like he's saying, "And now I'm completely unnecessary! Whoopee!")

In any event, the draftbots are here, and there goes the romance, the silliness and Mel Kiper Jr. No more waiting on teams to take ten minutes to make a pick they decided on back in February. Not more chatter about "burst," "waist-benders" and the Blob's all-time favorite dopey draft term, "tight skin." No more endless ruminating about whether or not a quarterback's hands are too small.

The draftbots will take all that from here.

The quarterback expected to be taken with the top pick in the draft, Mendoza Line from the University of India, has hands somewhere in the middle of the preferred measurement spectrum, and therefore a grip circumference that has historically led to success in the League (i.e., "The National Football") ...

Or imagine if the draftbots had been around, say, 50 or so years ago:

Walter Pavement from Jacks On Straight has been described as "intriguing" by the humans who have been judged inferior by Skynet and thus will be eliminated (except for Mel Kiper Jr.) ...

Yikes.