There?s a competitive advantage to keeping your list of targeted players secret to prevent other teams from drafting them out from under you. A craftily-managed team can plant misinformation designed to confuse competitors about who?s on its wish list. Players? agents also sometimes send up smokescreens to try to improve their clients? appeal.
Factor in the millions of dollars at stake in the draft ? and the intense interest it attracts from fans, mainstream journalists, and bloggers ? and you have an environment where rumors fly, speculation and misinformation reverberate around the Internet, and writers can be manipulated by sources.
?Teams will flat-out lie to you just to get you to write something and keep somebody off their trail,? said Omar Kelly, who covers the Miami Dolphins for the South Florida Sun-Sentinel. ?People will just try to use you.?
Kelly said teams and agents also increasingly leak disparaging rumors about specific players? ability, character, or morals. Teams do it with the hope that competing clubs will be scared away from talented prospects. Agents do it so that their own clients look better by comparison.
?It?s such a toxic time of year,? Kelly said in a phone interview. ?The gamesmanship is just huge.?
