Live from ... everywhere, the NFL draft will be a shared broadcast on two networks

Leave it to the NFL to help make our life a little less complicated in the midst of a global pandemic.

You won’t have to waste any time next week debating with family members over whether to watch the draft on ESPN or the NFL Network. The two networks are collaborating on one broadcast that will be aired by both. Which means those of you who have wished to see Mel Kiper Jr. and Daniel Jeremiah on the same television screen are going to get that opportunity.

ESPN’s Disney partner, ABC, also will broadcast the draft. But their production, narrated by Tom Rinaldi, will be heavy on story-telling geared less toward the hardcore football fan and more toward casual fans.

Both the ESPN/NFL Network broadcast of the April 23-25 draft and the ABC broadcast will emanate from ESPN’s studio in Bristol, Conn., though most of the of the on-air talent will be participating in the broadcast remotely from the safety of their homes.

The only two people on the ESPN/NFLN broadcast who will be in-studio will be ESPN’s Trey Wingo, who will host all three days of the draft, and his fellow ESPN colleague Suzy Kolber, who will conduct remote interviews with draft picks.

Participating remotely will be Kiper, Louis Riddick and Booger McFarland from ESPN and Jeremiah, Rich Eisen, Michael Irvin and Kurt Warner from NFLN.

ESPN insiders Adam Schefter and Chris Mortensen will provide draft updates from their homes.

ABC is using ESPN’s college football talent for its draft broadcast. Rece Davis, Maria Taylor and Jesse Palmer will be in-studio in Bristol, along with Rinaldi. Draft analyst Todd McShay, Kirk Herbstreit, Desmond Howard and David Pollack will participate remotely.

“Obviously, these are very challenging circumstances in the midst of COVID-19," Seth Markman, ESPN’s vice president of production, said Tuesday on a conference call with reporters. “But we have a great opportunity here to bring fans across the country a little bit of hope, a little bit of joy, and maybe a little bit of escape from what we’re experiencing day to day right now."

The broadcast also will include a “draftathon” to help raise money for the coronavirus battle, which as of Tuesday has claimed more than 25,000 lives in this country and more than 122,000 worldwide.

“The draftathon is a huge initiative across everything we’re doing," NFL Network senior vice president of programming and production Mark Quenzell said on the conference call. “The money [they raise] is important obviously and we’re focused on that. But equally important is the message it sends. The giving-back message and the we’re-all-in-it-together message.

“But it’s not just going to be a solicitation of money. Part of the draftathon is saluting the first responders. The medical first responders. The people that are in grocery stores and on the front lines of this thing.

“We want to give a proper salute and a proper thank you to all of the people that are not staying at home every day and are helping keep people alive by helping them put food on the table and those types of things. That’s going to be as much a part of the draftathon as the money, to be honest.’’

The broadcast is an enormous challenge for the two networks. They are relying on remote video technology to put the whole thing on.

NFL commissioner Roger Goodell will be announcing the selections from his Westchester, N.Y. home. NFL general managers will make the draft selections from their homes.

The networks have set up cameras in the homes of every head coach and general manager in the league. They hope to have 58 draft prospects participate remotely. They will have first-responders and medical professionals participating.

“At last count, there were somewhere in the neighborhood of 170-180 various elements and feeds coming from various parts of the country," Quenzell said. “To manage that, we’re running them through video call centers that will collect them all and then send them through to ESPN in batches and smaller groups to make it manageable.

“We also will be using a number of technologies to make sure we have as many backups as we can, whether it happens to be WiFi or uplinks or that type of thing."

Markman has been at ESPN for 27 years. He’s overseen a lot of big events. But he said this draft, because of the circumstances surrounding it, “is the most complicated event I personally ever have been involved in.

“The coordination that it’s taking and the magnitude of what we’re doing and the amount of feeds that are coming in and the technology we’re trying to use, is massive," he said. “And doing it all without any face-to-face meetings with our employees. I haven’t been in the ESPN building in three weeks and am going in next week for the first time in a while. Same with a lot of other people.

“So, it’s complicated. And now we’re adding the joint broadcast, which is 100% the right thing to do. But it adds another layer of complications. And we’re also producing the ABC broadcast from ESPN’s headquarters."

The one thing that will be conspicuously missing from this draft are fans. Before the pandemic changed everything, the draft was scheduled to be held in Las Vegas in front of tens of thousands of fans.

Quenzell said they have been testing a “virtual fan concept," where they would show fans from each team remotely, practicing proper social distancing of course.

“To be honest with you, we’re still working through that," he said. “If we do that, that would mean a gazillion more [video] feeds. So I don’t know where it’s going to finally end up.

“But it’s not lost on us that the fans usually are a big part of the draft experience. Clearly we can’t replicate that. But we are looking at a bunch of measures to try and figure out how we can bring the fans into this equation."

The NFL has received some criticism, though a lot less than you might’ve expected, for refusing to postpone its draft in the midst of the coronavirus crisis.

The ratings for the draft typically are outstanding. This year, with a captive stay-at-home audience and every other sport in coronavirus-forced hibernation?

Probably history-making.

“I’m not even going to offer a guess on the ratings," ESPN’s Markman said. “We were set up for a big ratings year anyway. But because of the circumstances we’re all in and everything else canceled, there’s more eyeballs and more anticipation."

This obviously isn’t going to be your typical NFL state-of-the-art broadcast even if there are no technological snafus. A lot of it could end up looking like the Zoom conference skit on Saturday Night Live last week.

But Markman thinks viewers will be OK with that.

“I think viewers have an unbelievable new understanding and tolerance for anything that we need to do at this point," he said. “I’ve watched shows on other networks in the last few weeks where people are in their basements or the signal isn’t strong or people have headphones on.

“We haven’t gotten any feedback from people that have said they’re going to be disappointed in the quality. I think people understand it and are appreciative that we were trying to do our best to create some normalcy, even though we can’t."