From cozy event to huge ordeal
Bert Bell had been burned and sought a way to get even. His creation, the NFL draft, has become an industry unto itself and the league’s third-most popular annual event behind the Super Bowl and opening weekend. Bell owned the Philadelphia Eagles in 1933 and was hot to sign Stanley “King Kong” Kostka of the Minnesota Gophers.
NASHVILLE, Tenn. — Bert Bell had been burned and sought a way to get even.
His creation, the NFL draft, has become an industry unto itself and the league’s third-most popular annual event behind the Super Bowl and opening weekend.
Bell owned the Philadelphia Eagles in 1933 and was hot to sign Stanley “King Kong” Kostka of the Minnesota Gophers. All collegians were free agents back then — college football was far more popular than the pros — and Bell saw the bruising fullback/linebacker as a building block for his team.
But Kostka signed with the Brooklyn Dodgers; yes, that was a football franchise back then. Never mind that Kostka lasted one season in the NFL. Bell had a calling.
“I made up my mind that this league would never survive unless we had some system whereby each team had an even chance to bid for talent against each other,” he later told The Associated Press.
With some negotiating and arm-twisting — Bell was so good at that he soon would become NFL commissioner — he persuaded owners of the other eight clubs to try a draft. The team with the league’s worst record would pick first and the rest would go in reverse order of their success in the standings.
On Feb 8-9, 1936, in a Philadelphia hotel owned by the Bell family, the draft was born. And guess who had the first selection: the 2-9 Eagles.
That they took halfback Jay Berwanger, the first Heisman Trophy winner, who played at Chicago University — yes, that was a college team back then — and couldn’t sign him was somewhat embarrassing; Berwanger chose to go into the “real world” where he could earn more money than the Eagles were offering.
Regardless, the draft was established, with nine rounds, increased to 10 the next year and to 20 in 1939, with this oddity in 1938 and ‘39: only the five teams with the worst winning percentage in the previous season made selections in the second and fourth rounds.
The number of rounds fluctuated through the years, in part because of competition from the All-America Football Conference in the 1940s, but also because college football grew and more players were available. For a span of a dozen drafts, there even was a bonus pick to start proceedings, with one team each year getting until every team had gotten one.
When the AFL began in 1960 and soon started pirating NFL players and hiding college seniors, the NFL moved its draft up from the spring. Cloak-and-dagger stories developed, as soon-to-be Pro Football Hall of Famer Gil Brandt told Ken Rappoport and me for the book “On The Clock, The Story of the NFL Draft.”
“Our battle for players with the AFL featured the so-called baby sitters who would hide players so the other league couldn’t find them,” said Brandt, who scouted the colleges for the Dallas Cowboys for three decades, drafting the likes of Roger Staubach, Bob Lilly and Tony Dorsett, and now is the lead draft consultant to the NFL. “There was a group of people, ex-coaches, ex-players, even the governor of Oregon, who were involved.”
The merger led to a common draft, but the grab bag for talent wasn’t a big deal whether staged in Philly, New York, Washington, Pittsburgh, Milwaukee, Los Angeles or Chicago. Then television stepped up.
This brand new TV entity called ESPN approached NFL Commissioner Pete Rozelle in 1980 offering to broadcast the proceedings from the New York Sheraton. Rozelle couldn’t fathom why ESPN boss Chet Simmons made the offer.
“Pete thought Chet was out of his mind,” said former ESPN vice president John Wildhack. “But Pete said, ‘Let’s try it.’”