Draft Daddy was started in Jan. 2003 by fans of the NFL draft,
unaffiliated with colleges, pro teams or agents.

excerpts from

On the Front Row
Chris Graham
chris@augustafreepress.com

Their Web sites have your attention as draft day draws near.

Admit it - you wonder about the people who run them, where they get their information, whether they're just regurgitating the opinions of other draftniks.

"I would say that the vast majority of the people running those sites have a subscription somewhere, and they're just recycling things that they've heard. But to me, there's no substitute for what your own eyes can tell you," said Matt Bitonti, the publisher of DraftDaddy.com, which provides in-depth NFL draft analysis year-round.

"We really just love the draft - and when you love something as much as this, you have to get as much information as possible to do it the way you want to. And it became clear pretty early on that you can't rely on anybody else but yourself. I mean, when you go and meet a player and shake his hand and talk to him for a while and watch him do little things, you get a good feel for what kind of a person he is and what kind of a player he is," Bitonti told The Augusta Free Press.

DraftDaddy.com is one of a handful of Internet sites that offer the real deal in terms of original draft coverage. Bitonti and his staff devote thousands of hours of time to breaking down game film and traveling to postseason all-star games.

Bitonti has to juggle a day job with his work on the draft.

"I've only known about three or four people who do draft analysis as their job," Bitonti said. "Most people in the quote-unquote 'industry' have an alternate source of income that pays the bills - because let's be honest, if there was a reliable way of making money, the draft season is only January to April. And then after that, it's pretty much only the diehard people or families or whoever who are following the stuff until next season, when teams start getting eliminated from the playoffs.

"So it's a very seasonal activity - and it would be hard for most people to make their income purely on that," Bitonti said.

Paid-access sites could be the wave of the future in the draft industry. Bitonti, for one, isn't among those out there looking for a surfboard.

"There are sites that are pretty well-known sites that are subscription based. That's a business model that people tend toward when their site gets success. But we're never going to do that," Bitonti said.

"We've made the conscious decision that we'd rather talk to 10,000 new people a day than the same 200 subscribers every day. It is a way of making more money, but at the end of the day, you're not reaching as many people," Bitonti said.

And in the end, that's what it's all about, these draft-themed Web sites - sharing opinions about who should go where like football fans have done for years and years at the neighborhood bar, only the neighborhood bar today is the Internet, and you can reach 10,000 people as easily as you can the guy on the next stool.

"We had 13,000 unique visitors here today on a Monday. Can you imagine if you had 13,000 people in a room, and you were talking to them? That's what you're doing. It's about reaching people, having a voice, having an opinion," Bitonti said.