YMMV / Draft Day

• Designated Villain: Bo Callahan's moral shortcomings seem more than a little nitpicky, perhaps in an effort to draw a contrast with the high character of Vontae Mack. None of Callahan's teammates went to his birthday party, he lied about the $100 dollar bill in the Washington playbook they sent him (a Secret Test of Character), and he struggled with the pass rush in a game against Mack (a game Callahan eventually won with a big clutch pass). These would hardly seem to condemn him forever to the land of the loathsome, but that's sort of how people talk about him. This is, in a weird sense, rather realistic — the NFL draft process drags on for months, and both teams and pundits have a lot of time to relentlessly pick apart prospects, which leads to obsessive focus on seemingly irrelevant flaws or personal eccentricities (players are sometimes criticized for having too many interests outside football and being too interested in various issues and causes, for examples). The movie, however, treats the talk around Callahan as completely reasonable.
• Hilarious in Hindsight:
  • The fictional Browns made a lot of 'splashes' in the draft, which seemed very implausible. However, the real Cleveland Browns made a lot more splashes in the 2014 NFL Draft. Jon Gruden even mentioned that the 2014 draft was 'more exciting than Draft Day.'
  • The notion that Cleveland is the big winner while pulling a fast one on Seattle is pretty hilarious given that the Browns are the long standing model of bad luck and ineptitude while Seattle had just won the Super Bowl two months before!
    • Seattle trading heavily to get a new quarterback in the first round would be highly unlikely as Seattle already had one of the best young quarterbacks in the NFL at the time in Russell Wilson.
  • Bo Callahan is very obviously based upon 2012 Heisman Trophy winner Johnny Manziel. In the real 2014 draft, Manziel dropped from first... into the Browns' hands. "Johnny Football" proved to be a problem child, and eventually left the Browns due to drug and legal issues. And while it isn't made clear how Bo's career had turned out after the draft, the film makes it clear that he has serious character issues and, therefore, high bust potential.
    • It's also possible Callahan was partly based on 1998 second-overall pick Ryan Leaf. This was lampshaded in a scene where Ali reminds Sonny of how everyone said Leaf was a great talent ahead of the draft, but no one believed 199th-overall draftee Tom Brady was such in 2000.
    • The movie works in part because the Cleveland Browns have a memetic Butt-Monkey status at the very least ever since the 1995/99 relocation controversy. Here the Browns come out ahead for once, yet the real life Browns make exactly the error the fictional Browns avoid in the movie: Being distracted by the flashy gunslinger Quarterback fresh out of college.
• Spiritual Antithesis: Could be seen as one to Moneyball. Instead of basing all his decisions on raw numbers Sonny focuses on a player’s character.
• Unintentional Period Piece: Just in the decade following its release, a number of elements became dated.
  • The NFL draft was, at the time the film was set, held every year in New York at Radio City Music Hall. Starting a few years after, it began rotating around the US to the cities with NFL franchises.
  • The Oakland Raiders moved to Las Vegas, and the Redskins rebranded as the Commanders.
  • Jon Gruden, who was featured in cameos, returned to coaching and then left the NFL in disgrace after his offensive emails were exposed.
  • The $125 million salary cap mentioned by Ali more than doubled in size.
  • And more broadly, the value of halfbacks has been re-evaluated in the subsequent years, such that spending a top 10 pick on one (let alone the additional 2nd rounders) would be heavily criticized.
  • In the age of social media, Vontae Mack's ill sister being the fan he gave the ball to and was flagged for would have become a big sports news story within 24 hours of it happening and Sonny and the rest of the Browns staff would know all about it.