NFL Draft History: From Bert Bell’s Plan to a National Event

The first player selected in an NFL draft never played in the league. On February 8, 1936, at Philadelphia’s Ritz-Carlton Hotel, the Eagles chose University of Chicago halfback Jay Berwanger. They traded his rights to the Bears, but he never played for Chicago. The Pro Football Hall of Fame’s account of that first draft illustrates a fundamental distinction: selecting a player does not guarantee that he will sign or play.

The draft began as a way to give weaker clubs access to college talent. Its later history reflects two different developments—changes to how teams acquired players, and changes to how the public watched them do it.

Why Bert Bell proposed a draft

Before 1936, players could sign with any NFL club. Stronger teams could keep attracting the best prospects, widening the gap between established winners and struggling franchises.

Eagles owner Bert Bell proposed reversing that advantage. Under his plan, teams would select college players in inverse order of their finish the previous season. NFL owners adopted it on May 19, 1935, for use the following year. Bell was an owner at the time, not yet commissioner. The Hall of Fame’s draft history identifies competitive disparity as the problem the new system was intended to address.

The draft was designed to distribute opportunity more evenly, not to guarantee equal results. A club still had to choose wisely and reach an agreement with its selection.

Berwanger illustrated the second difficulty immediately. He had won the first award later known as the Heisman Trophy, but professional football was not his inevitable next step. According to the Heisman Trust’s biography, he sought $25,000 over two years from Bears owner-coach George Halas. Halas declined, and Berwanger took a job selling foam rubber.

The early draft was not today’s seven-round event

The inaugural draft had nine rounds. It increased to ten in 1937 and twenty in 1939. In 1938 and 1939, the league also gave extra help to weaker clubs: only the five lowest-finishing teams could select in the second and fourth rounds. These were explicit attempts to strengthen the draft’s balancing effect, documented in the Hall of Fame’s institutional history.

Round labels therefore need historical context. Bart Starr, for example, was a seventeenth-round selection in 1956—but the 200th player taken overall. The Hall of Fame’s draft-year register records both numbers. Calling him simply a “seventeenth-round pick” without explaining the longer draft makes his selection difficult to compare with modern picks.

The seven-round format arrived in 1994, well after the league’s earliest drafting experiments.

Rival leagues changed what a draft pick meant

A draft could allocate rights within the NFL without preventing another league from pursuing the same player.

During the 1960s, the NFL and American Football League held separate drafts through 1966. A prospect could be selected by both and choose between competing offers. Joe Namath’s 1965 selections make the arrangement clear: the AFL’s New York Jets drafted him in the first round, while the NFL’s St. Louis Cardinals took him twelfth overall. Both selections appear in the Hall of Fame’s historical register.

The first common draft came in 1967. The leagues held joint drafts in 1967, 1968 and 1969, before their full merger in 1970. Thus, “common-draft era” begins three years earlier than “post-merger NFL.” The Hall of Fame’s overview records the separate drafts and the three joint drafts preceding the merger.

Baltimore selected defensive end Bubba Smith first overall in 1967. The same first-round record includes AFL clubs such as Miami, Denver and Oakland alongside NFL clubs—a single selection process even while the leagues remained separate on the field.

How the selection meeting became a public event

ESPN first televised the draft in 1980. Its initial coverage ran more than eight hours on a Tuesday, with George Grande reporting from the New York Sheraton’s ballroom. In a 2019 retrospective, Grande recalled that the broadcasters did not know how many people would watch.

In 2010, the first round moved to Thursday-night primetime as the draft became a three-day event. That scheduling change gave the opening round its own television showcase, as ABC13’s history of the event explains.

The next major shift was geographic. Chicago hosted in 2015, ending the uninterrupted New York run that began in 1965. The official announcement published by the Giants paired the indoor selection meeting with fan festivities in Grant Park and Congress Plaza. The draft was becoming a host-city celebration, not merely a broadcast from a theater.

The 2020 pandemic forced another version: Roger Goodell announced selections from his basement, recorded in the Hall of Fame’s draft history. The setting could change radically while the draft’s central function remained: allocating rights to incoming players among the league’s teams.