The NFL draft is broadcast live on television every year as millions tune in and hundreds of thousands more attend in person to revel in the hoopla of it all.
It’s a far cry from the event’s humble beginnings, when the player picked first didn’t even know it was happening and soon walked away from the game without ever earning a cent.
Two-hundred-fifty-seven players will be drafted this week in Green Bay, Wisconsin, and anyone chosen in the first round – which begins at 8 p.m. ET on Thursday – will be set for life with guaranteed multi-million-dollar contracts. It was all very different in the first year of the draft back in 1936 when just 81 players were selected through nine rounds in the inaugural draft.
There was little doubt that University of Chicago halfback Jay Berwanger would go first that year. At 6-foot tall and 195 pounds, the standout player of his class had just received the first ever Heisman Trophy and been named as the Chicago Tribune’s Big 10 player of the year.
The Hartford Courant described the first draft as “no gala, more like a penny-ante poker game. Nine cigar-puffing, mogul wannabees, some of whom were paying their players with IOUs, stubbornly trying to salvage their dream of professional football.”
Berwanger told the Courant in 1994 that he was oblivious to the draft at the Ritz-Carlton Hotel in Philadelphia.
“I found out I was drafted by reading it in the newspaper,” he said, “I didn’t even know the draft was going on.”
Philadelphia Eagles owner Bert Bell had persuaded his peers to formalize a draft in order to cease the expensive and “self-defeating” bidding wars for college players and he’d proposed that teams should choose players in reverse order from the previous season’s standings. That meant the worst team, Bell’s own 2-9 Eagles, went first and chose Berwanger, quickly dealing his rights to the Chicago Bears. The Eagles didn’t think they’d be able to afford Berwanger’s salary demands, and the Bears owner and coach George Halas soon realized he didn’t have enough money, either.
According to the Courant, the two met in the lobby of a downtown hotel in Chicago.
“He asked what I wanted,” Berwanger recalled, “and I had my tongue in my cheek. I told him, $25,000 for two years. He looked at my date and said, `Nice to have met you; have a nice time tonight.’ And that was the end of it.”
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