The most mind-numbing time of the year from a professional sports perspective is clearly the NFL pre-season, but a close second is the NFL Draft, even though some of the reactions that it generates are rather humorous.

But as this Reed Albertotti/WSJ article points out, all this fuss is being made about something that is really obsolescent:

The draft was once an innovative solution for distributing college talent to pro teams, but that was 75 years ago. The economics of pro football have gradually made it less effective, and as the college game becomes increasingly different from the NFL, players have become even more difficult to scout.

What’s surprising is that the NFL, a league with a long history of making sweeping rules changes, hasn’t much changed its draft format since the draft was first held in 1936. Since then, an entire academic-research area known as "market design," a spinoff of the Nobel Prize-winning concept of game theory, has grown exponentially to serve just this purposeóhelping markets operate more efficiently by creating better rules and procedures to govern them.

And the best alternative would actually make the draft much more fun to watch ñ an old-fashioned auction of players:

Three researchers at Harvard Business Schoolówho studied under Alvin Roth, a Harvard professor and a pioneer in market-design theoryóhave proposed an alternative to the NFL draft.

Under their plan, all 32 teams would be given seven picks. They would have to abide by a spending cap that would go higher to lowerówith the worst team (based on its record the previous season) having the most money to spend. When the bidding opened, the most sought-after players would draw multiple bids. Teams could then raise their bid as high as they’d like for a player they coveted.

Theoretically, a team could get any player it wantedóso long as it was prepared to pinch pennies on everyone else. Meanwhile, a team that didn’t want to break the bank on any particular player could pick up lots of useful parts by spreading its money around evenly. Teams could also thrive by focusing on the bidding and looking for bargains.

Management of NFL teams would probably resist an auction because it would complicate the development of their drafting strategy. But itís not as if most teams do all that well drafting players under the current system. And it would sure make it more entertaining for the fans.