NFL hopefuls prepare to hug it out with Roger Goodell

Congratulations. You’ve made it to the NFL. Get that handshake out of right here and hug your new boss. Significantly, the larger the higher.

Such is life for NFL commissioner Roger Goodell and first-round picks within the NFL Draft, at the very least since 2010 when a 300-pound defensive sort out named Gerald McCoy took the league’s prime government into his 33-inch arms.

Overseeing his third draft as commissioner that 12 months, Goodell met Sam Bradford and Ndamukong Suh, that 12 months’s prime picks, with a standard handshake. The following choose had different concepts. After being taken third general by Tampa Bay, the newly minted Buccaneer shocked everybody by ignoring the commissioner’s outstretched hand in favor of an extended, heartfelt bear hug.

McCoy recalled the second to ESPN’s Doug Williams.

“Once I was hugging him, he stated, like, ‘You’re crushing me proper now’ and he type of gasped for air like I used to be squeezing the life out of him, which I used to be,” stated McCoy. “I used to be simply excited.”

Naturally, Trent Williams, the fourth choose in that 12 months’s draft would not depart the stage with no hug of his personal and a convention was born. Excluding 2020 when the Covid-19 pandemic compelled the NFL to carry a digital draft, first-round picks have gotten hugs from Goodell ever since.