At-home NFL Draft leads to epic prop bets—and important IT teams

This year’s NFL Draft will be like no other—certainly like never before, and hopefully not like another one ever again. Due to the coronavirus crisis, there will be no pomp and circumstance in Las Vegas as had been eagerly anticipated. Now, everything will be conducted remotely. Draftees will be at home, as will all 32 war rooms, and commissioner Roger Goodell will announce picks via the internet.

Ah, the internet. It never ceases to cause problems—especially when you have relatively old people trying to navigate it, which will presumably be the case throughout the upcoming festivities on Thursday, Friday, and Saturday.

That’s where teams’ IT departments come in.

The Detroit Lions, for example, will have their IT guy parked outside the residence of general manager Bob Quinn. Steve Lancaster, the Lions’ director of information technology, has his Winnebago ready to go in Quinn’s driveway. In his house, the GM will have a TV to his right, three monitors to his left, two laptops, a home phone, two cell phones, a separate draft phone, and a printer. All of his necessary draft boards will also be screen-shared and printed out as hard copies. And Lancaster, of course, will be on call to troubleshoot any technical issues that could arise.

“We’ll have redundancies on everything,” Quinn assured. “We’ll have at my house and (head) coach (Matt) Patricia’s house, redundancies for internet, redundancies for power, redundancies for phones, so I would say our IT department…they’ve done an outstanding job of setting us up. I feel terrific about the setup; I feel confident that it’s going to work.”

But enough about technology. Let’s get on with what’s important: prop bets.

The benefit of this unique event is that props that we have certainly never seen before have inserted themselves into what will undoubtedly be the most heavily wagered NFL Draft in history. Enjoy some of these examples:

– The Over/Under on dogs shown via streams during the first round is 3.5 (Over is -120; Under is -120)

– The Over/Under on cats shown via streams during the first round is 0.5 (Over is -130; Under is -110)

– The highest number of people shown in a single room is 9.5 (Over is -140; Under is +100)

– Any draftee shown drinking a beer is +250 (No is -400)

– Any draftee popping champagne is +400 (No is -700)

– Pizza being visible in any draftee’s home is -600 (No is +350)

– Any team failing to get a pick in on time is +140 (No is -180)

– The draft getting hacked is +800 (No is -2500)

If you’re looking for more NFL Draft betting picks head over to NFL Draft prop bets.