The end is near.

We may have finally found a breaking point to the NFL’s demand for every second of our attention.

As the first round of the NFL Draft gets set to kick off tonight, the league and its marquee offseason event are approaching a limit in the interest the sport can drive in the casual fan.

The NFL’s popularity, and football in general, was built as much on our love for controlled violence and spectacular athleticism as it was on our lightning-fast attention spans.

The NFL has the shortest season of the four major sports. It has the simplest playoff system. It doesn’t demand five days of the week like the other major sports. It doesn’t take eight months for the season to finish.

 For most of its history the NFL demanded two days of our attention. Fans watched the games on Sunday, then discussed what happened at the office on Monday, before settling into the marquee matchup of the week.

Every game is a must-see event.

It drives discussion. Its accessibility fits into everyone’s schedule. How easy it is to follow is what, along with the exciting action on the field, makes it as popular as any sport in the country.

But what has worked so well is also driving the NFL to fill up the time its not on TV. The five days of discussion and anticipation for the next slate of games that used to drive the excitement in the past has broken down into two.

Thursday football has gone from a holiday special once a season to an every-week event. The NFL is playing Saturday games at the end of its season and the offseason has extended into a year-round schedule, beginning with the scouting combine and continuing through the draft, team workouts, mini-camps and training camp before the season gets started in earnest.

All the time between games is now gone and the long offseason to refresh has disappeared. Once an easy sport to follow on the weekends, the NFL has begun to demand more time and more attention than any of the other major leagues.

There is now as much time between the end of the major bowl season and the draft as there is in the entire NFL regular season, all of it filled with empty speculation and anonymous sources blowing smoke. Mock drafts take mostly wrong guesses at an unpredictable event and manufactured outrage has become as much as a lead up to the draft as player evaluation.

So when does burnout set in?

The league has already seen push back to its ambition.

According to Nielsen ratings, a two-hour schedule release show on ESPN drew fewer viewers than both NBA playoff games on the same day, three NHL playoff games, a Mexican league soccer match and a rerun of Pardon the Interruption. The three-hour event on the NFL Network had fewer viewers than something called Shaqtin a Fool and a NASCAR talk show.

ESPN ran a full live mock draft, for three full rounds, which accomplished nothing other than filling air time.

But what happens when there’s nothing left to use as filler? And what happens then when the NFL’s mundane events made marquee by our general free time run into something of substance we actually care about?

That’s what’s happening this weekend.

Just as the draft is trying to conduct its final four rounds, the Kentucky Derby, the first major horse race and the signal of spring in most of the country, is taking place. Later in the night, when NFL draft talk is supposed to be at its height, the largest prize fight in history will take place in Las Vegas between Manny Pacquiao and Floyd Mayweather.

The draft, once only running against inconsequential first-round playoff games, isn’t the biggest event of the weekend. The NFL, whose popularity was grown by being a must-see event, isn’t the event that everyone must see this weekend. For the first time in decades, talk on Monday won’t likely concern the NFL Draft that saw its last interesting picks taken half a week earlier.

The NFL Draft will be just another thing that happened. Old news.

The NFL can’t continue to demand more time in the year without eventually turning fans away.

The end is near for the endless coverage. This weekend may be the start.

Joseph Terry is a sports reporter and columnist for The Daily Inter Lake in Kalispell. He can contacted at (406) 758-4463 or via email at jterry@dailyinterlake.com.