Granted, the NFL draft has come a long way since the days of 16 owners sitting around a hotel lounge smoking, drinking and flipping through copies of the previous year’s Street and Smith’s college football preview looking for guys to pick.

Now the draft is covered live, on a weekend, on not one, but two TV networks. Some people actually sit down and watch the whole thing. Then, of course, some people attend WNBA games, and I don’t understand them, either.

But watching the draft shouldn’t be akin to oral surgery. No, it should be fun.

You know how much we love the NBA Draft. We devote an entire live “game”cast to it every year. It’s fast, it’s flashy (and those are just Craig Sager’s suits), and you know pretty much everybody who gets drafted. Admittedly, that’s changing now that half of the lottery is full of guys named Darko or kids too young to rent porn, but still…

The NFL Draft has a few glaring weaknesses. Let’s break them down.

1) Who the hell needs 15 minutes to make a draft choice? I’ve been in fantasy drafts with guys who flunked out of community college and they didn’t need 15 minutes to make a draft pick.

2) Way too much Chris Berman. Taken in small doses, he’s fine. He can still be funny and relatively hip. But at an event where the first round takes approximately four days to finish, I can’t take wall-to-wall Berman. Every year it’s the same thing. He wears a suit that fit him (maybe) in 1989, he sweats under the TV lights so much that by pick six his pancake makeup is in his lap and so is his combover. Then, to top it all off, he does the same joke every pick. Everybody in the world knows that ESPN gets the word on who’s been picked just before the commissioner is handed the card to read at the podium. They do that so ESPN can get the right graphics and highlight package ready to show immediately after the announcement.

Basically, it works like this. The NFL team that is “on the clock” fills out a card (or cards if they’re still debating) with the draftees name and draft number on it. When they make up their mind they turn the appropriate (they hope) card to an NFL official. That official checks to make sure the guy really is draft eligible, tells ESPN who it is and then walks the card over to Paul Tagliabue. Immediately an ESPN producer tells Berman. Meanwhile, Chris is conducting a last-second around the table “who’s the pick going to be” discussion. Miraculously, just as Tagliabue is walking to the podium, Berman belts out his “guess” and he’s always right. Then the gang at the set sitting next to him all laugh and act like he’s a genius.

Make it stop. We figured it out six years ago. It’s not funny. It’s stupid.

3) That cheesy New York audience. It’s basically 100 guys wearing either Jets or Giants jerseys and those stupid NFL fireman’s helmets. They cheer and boo the New York teams’ picks like they’re all a little gang of Mel Kiper, Juniors. There are some great moments, though, like when the Eagles’ fans who showed up booed Donovan McNabb a few year’s back. It’s a good thing that Donovan’s Chunky Soup mom didn’t come to the draft, or asses would have been kicked.

4) Andrea Kramer’s bugging eyes. Thyroid medication, when take in the proper dosage will alleviate this problem. Let’s chip in and get her some. I pity you folks who have HDTV already, I can’t imagine the horror of sitting on the couch worried that one of Andrea’s eyeballs will slam through the screen.

5) Stu Scott, doing anything. My proposal for Stu is that this year he cover the draft from the new Soldier Field. Maybe something will fall on him.

And don’t think the irony of going from Andrea’s Kramer’s bugging eyes to Stu Scott and his lazy one was lost on me.

6) ESPN has more money than God’s stepson, and yet, they will cover a half dozen teams by putting a cheesy videophone in the “war room” and using it to talk to the coach. The only reason they do this is to suck some sponsor money out of Sprint or whoever the sucker is this year. I don’t need a shot of Brian Billick standing in front of a halting 14 frames per second videophone, looking like Ted Koppel reporting with the 5th Infantry, when I know full well that he’s standing in a room in the middle of a $30 million training facility that has a satellite hook-up in the next room. Enough!

However, there are some cool things (of course) that I’m not going to change.

1) I love the amount of crap that is on the screen all the time. You’ve got the ticker at the bottom showing every pick so far (though I always flick over one pick after the Bears’ has gone by and having to wait for five minutes for it come back around), the info on the side about who the highest rated players left are, plus the list of teams with picks coming up. Great stuff. In fact, you could fill the entire screen with that stuff unless Suzy Kolber is on, or maybe if Melissa Stark makes a cameo.

2) When the draft picks who are there, put their new baseball cap on and shake the commish’s hand. You’ve got some guy who is 6’5, 385 pounds and the hat on his head looks like one that you can get a sundae in at Dairy Queeen. Priceless.

Plus, have you seen the hats this year? Retro sheik. The old three bar hat with the logo in the middle and the block type on each side? Not only that, but the back is mesh! Yikes. Some things retro need to say retro.

3) Mel Kiper, Jr.– I love this guy. The helmet hair, using words like “hip swivel”, “measurables”, “depth of drop.” It’s all so useless, it’s hilarious. Plus, ESPN always breaks out the film of Bill Polian mocking Mel, “My mailman knows more about football than Mel Kiper, Jr. WHO IS, Mel Kiper, anyway?” Polian should be reminded that the pick he made that Mel mocked him for was Hall of Famer Trev Alberts. Wait, Trev’s not a hall of famer? They just paid him like one? By the way, Trev will be on the broadcast too. Symmetry. Nice.

4) Jimmy Johnson — Last year he was the star of the show. Jimmy knows the draft like nobody’s business. I don’t know if he’ll be back this year (not sure if his Fox contract allows him to be there on ESPN) but if he is, he’s priceless.

Of course, I have some suggestions for improvements.

1) Ten minutes for picks in the first round (I know that football trades are complicated), five minutes for picks in rounds two through five and then one minute for picks in the last round. I literally want to see teams having to run their picks to the podium for losers like Joe Aska or Mike Finn.

2) Fly in Craig Sager for the draft pick interviews. Chris Fowler is no Craig Sager. Remember last year at the NBA draft when Sager made a remark about how hot Casey Jacobsen’s girlfriend was and then asked if she had a sister. That stuff is priceless.

3) Less Merill Hoge and Ron Jaworski. Of course, this will cut into the Suzy Kolber time, but that’s OK. I like Merrill and Jaws, but they get to be a little much, and if I wanted to watch coaches’ tape, I’d have become a coach. Thanks.

4) Absolutely no Sean Salisbury. His voice is grating, he’s an idiot and he had some sort of weird eyejob and now he looks like a human raccoon. It’s unsettling. Trade him to Fox Sports Net for Michael Irvin’s mink coat.

5) Make it a league rule that the Bears have to draft a quarterback with their first round pick every year until they finally get a good one. Sid Luckman’s been dead for four years and hasn’t thrown a pass for 50 and he’s still the last star quarterback the Bears have had.

See, the draft is almost perfect. Almost.