Falcons beat writer D. Orlando Ledbetter provides a timeline on the rise of the NFL draft.
1. Beginnings
On May 19, 1935, Bert Bell, owner of the Philadelphia Eagles, proposed a draft during a league meeting. Teams would pick in reverse order of finish and select college players whose eligibility had expired. The first draft was held Feb. 8, 1936 at the Ritz-Carlton Hotel in Philadelphia. The names of 90 college prospects were written on a blackboard.
2. Early scouting reports
The draft continued to expand until it reached 30 rounds in 1943, but most of those players reported for military duty. During the 1940s, some team executives prepared for the draft by reading Street & Smith’s college football yearbook or other college football magazines. Rams owner Dan Reeves is credited with hiring the first scout, Eddie Kotal. The draft moved around each year and was staged in hotels.
3. AFL vs. NFL
In 1960s, the stakes increased when the AFL began play. Backed by Kansas City owner Lamar Hunt’s oil money, the AFL battled the NFL for the top stars and scored a coup when the New York Jets signed Joe Namath in 1964 to a three-year deal worth $400,000. The escalation of money spent on the players led to the merger in 1966.
4. The computer
Dallas, Los Angeles and San Francisco used the first computer program to amass reports that were filed by their scouts and had a rudimentary system up and running for the 1965 draft. Dallas’ Tex Schramm had worked the 1960 Olympics and was impressed with how IBM’s computers cranked out the results. The Cowboys used the system to discover players from small colleges.
5. Going viral
In 1980, ESPN asked the NFL to broadcast the annual “selection meeting.” The upstart TV network, which then was in only 7 million homes, needed programming. With the advent of sports talk radio and the Internet by the late 1990s, there was an explosion of interest in the draft. By 2004, 31 million people watched. In 2010, the NFL moved to its current three-day format.
