Country singer roasted for NFL Draft performance: 'Luke Bryan came on and instantly muted that bulls***'
American country singer Luke Bryan performed at the NFL Draft on Saturday. The draft was held remotely with NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell, league personnel, and club staff working from their individual locations in light of social distancing norms thanks to the COVID-19 pandemic.
Midway through the fourth round, the coverage cut to a performance from Luke Bryan, which surprised many fans. Bryan performed his hit number, ‘Play It Again’. Fans, who were watching the coverage, were not pleased. In no time at all, they began roasting him on Twitter, leading “Luke Bryan" to become a trending topic on the social media website.
"Why is Luke Bryan on the TV" asked ESPN reporter Courtney Cronin on Twitter on April 25.
An NFL fan tweeted, “Imagine getting drafted while Luke Bryan sings a country song over zoom.” Most expressed their distaste through memes and GIFs. Like one user, who tweeted a GIF of Steve Carell from ‘The Office’ leaving the room, with the text, “Me: ‘Nothing can stop me from watching this draft. Nothing!’ ESPN: Here’s Luke Bryan performing his new song.”
The massively popular Twitter account NFL Memes, that has over 700,000 followers, wrote, “Imagine working your whole life to get drafted and instead of announcing your name ESPN has Luke Bryan singing a country song over zoom.” An NFL fan wrote, "I’d trade a draft pick to get Luke Bryan to not play a song."
The Twitter account for Saving Country Music, a news platform about the music genre, too took a dig at Bryan and wrote, “On behalf of country music, we want to offer our sincerest apologies and condolences to all NFL fans traumatized by the performance of Luke Bryan during the Draft broadcast. For the record, we don't like him either, and would instead recommend Cody Jinks and the Turnpike Troubadours.”
Another angry fan tweeted, "Luke Bryan came on and instantly muted that bull s***." While most of the NFL fans’ sentiments could be summed up with this tweet, “Luke Bryan? Aren't we suffering enough?” But not everyone’s hate was directed towards the musician himself. CBS Sports journalist Tom Fornelli wrote, “ESPN is about 10 picks behind discussing players but at least we all got that Luke Bryan song.”
Bryan’s fans, however, came to his defense. One of them said, “These are true @LukeBryanOnline fans. Not the haters. The haters don’t understand how nice and sweet Luke Bryan is. He’s the hottest country singer ever!” Along with the comment were photos of the musician’s past live performances."
The National Football League Draft has been an annual event since it was first held in 1936. It serves as the league's most common source of player recruitment. Each team is given a position in the drafting order in reverse order relative to its record in the previous year. This means that the last-place team is positioned first. From this position, the team can either select a player, or trade their position to another team for other draft positions, a player or players, or any combination of them.
