It is showtime at the N.F.L. meat market in Philadelphia, as teams begin the business of drafting players and relentlessly flogging their product.
The league oversees this phantasmagoria with a blend of Area 51 paranoia and P. T. Barnum hucksterism. And it began a few months earlier at the butcher shop that is the N.F.L. scouting combine in Indianapolis, where big young men were weighed, measured and poked, and had family medical histories and genes analyzed as if they were the finest Wagyu cattle.
Coaches, scouts, coordinators and fans watched young men in spandex shorts run the 40-yard dash and jump and bench-press.