The NFL Draft hasn’t even started yet and I’m ready for it to be over.

The football league’s annual procession of large men in oversized suits was pushed back two weeks this season to accommodate a previous booking by Radio City Music Hall, a performance called “Heart and Lights” featuring the Rockettes.

Fittingly, the league was all too eager to high step its marquee off-season production to mid-May.

It’s all part of the leagues long-term plan to dominate the sports calendar year-round. Already with more eyes than any other sport, the NFL is looking to take advantage of the seven months it’s not playing live games with content that will draw millions of viewers to their TV sets.

The issue for them has always been one thing: the rest of the offseason isn’t all that interesting. Player personnel decisions and oraganized team activities aren’t appointment television despite taking up the bulk of the calendar between the Super Bowl and the preseason kickoff. Stretching doesn’t sell commercials.

The only truly compelling platform the league has in that empty space is the draft. Free agent signings can be interesting but come with an established resume. Many are known quantities, guys that add to the intrigue of the next season in a way you can reasonably guess how it will turn out.

There’s no new car smell. There’s no mystery.

That’s can’t be said about the draft. Qualities that are known to work against lesser competition in the college game don’t always work against the best of the best at the next level. Schedule difficulties vary, as does the quality of teammates and opponents. The business of how to translate college success into the professional game has made an entire industry, based almost solely on intrigue and playing on the hearts and emotions of personal bias when it comes to State U.

The NFL, wisely, has tried to capture that by turning the draft into a primetime event.

After a particularly long first round in 2006, one that took more than six hours and was followed by even more rounds on television, the NFL has made the event more viewer friendly. It shortened the amount of time alloted to make a pick and pushed the start time of the first round back from noon ET to 3 p.m., then 4, 7:30 and eventually 8. It separated the first round from the rest of the draft, stretching the draft from two days to three. It has jazzed up production, added intro music and invited more and more players to the event to play up the spectacle as the new millionaires hug league representatives and show off their new team colors.

And all of it has worked beautifully. They’ve taken all the best things about the spectacle — glitz, glamor and new found hope — and played them up. Every team has a hope for a championship, every season looks promising.

Which is why pushing the draft back makes no sense. It takes away two weeks to marvel at your team’s new additions and ponder all the great things they’ll do in the coming season. It replaces that time with two more weeks of front-office machinations and the speculative non-stories that come from front-office machinations.

In essence, they replaced two weeks of driving a new car with two weeks of window shopping outside the dealership.

So it comes as no surprise the league is reportedly considering moving the start date of the draft back further, possibly to late May, and could extend the draft from three days to four, adding even more down time.

Of course there’s more downsides than just viewer fatigue. Moving the date back any further could stunt the acclimation process of new players and lessen the time they have to learn a new system before the season starts. It prevents players from getting settled in their new cities and getting comfortable with their new surroundings before being thrown into the fire of the NFL.

It’s also one of an increasing number of awful, short-sighted money grabs the NFL has made over the last few years, including adding more games in London, Thursday night contests, a push for an 18-game schedule and whatever that movie with Kevin Costner was this spring.

Hopefully, someone in the league office can come to their senses. Because the draft, and the league itself, is starting to wear out its welcome.