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NFL Report: The
Commissioner's View -- Spring 1999 They gathered
in a meeting room of the Ritz Carlton Hotel in Philadelphia, the men who ran
the National Football League’s nine clubs. The date was February 8, 1936.
The occasion was the NFL’s inaugural college player draft, the first of its
sort by any professional sports league.
The event bore
little resemblance to the current NFL draft with team “war rooms” spread
from coast to coast, sophisticated year-round scouting operations,
tremendous fan interest, and massive media coverage such as ESPN’s
wall-to-wall national telecast. For that first draft, a list of about 90
players was posted on a blackboard in the hotel meeting room. The scant
information on players that existed at the time consisted mainly of lists of
All-America teams selected at the end of the college season.
The attendees
that day included many of the league’s pioneers: George Halas, Art Rooney,
Tim Mara, Bert Bell, George Preston Marshall, and Curly Lambeau. There was
good-natured joking and even some music, with Cardinals coach Jimmy
Conzelman playing the piano and George Preston Marshall doing the singing
during lulls in the day. It had some of the atmosphere of a party. The NFL is
credited with developing the essential structure of the modern sports
league. And no idea was more important to the success of the NFL, and
ultimately to the growth of professional sports, than the draft. It created
competitive balance, giving all teams a chance to win and expanding interest
in the league. Pro Football Hall of Fame coach and owner Paul Brown once
called the draft “the lifeblood of the business.” Who came up
with the idea, you ask? The answer is
deBenneville Bell, better known as Bert Bell. From a prominent Philadelphia
family (which owned the city’s Ritz Carlton Hotel), Bert Bell loved
football, which he played at the University of Pennsylvania. In 1933, he and
a partner were awarded the defunct Frankford Yellow Jackets, which they
immediately moved to Philadelphia and renamed the Eagles. The problem
for Bell’s new franchise was that it was unable to attract first-rate
playing talent in the NFL’s free-for-all system of the time. The league was
ruled on and off the field in those days by the Chicago Bears, New York
Giants, and Green Bay Packers. Realizing that the only way for lesser teams
to improve was to have first shot at incoming players, Bell proposed at a
league meeting in May of 1935 his idea for an annual draft of college
players, much as the military drafted individuals into specific branches of
the service. The NFL’s
visionary leaders supported the plan, to the surprise of some, because they
understood how it would spread interest in the game. Current Giants co-owner
Wellington Mara remembers his father Tim saying, “This is something we
should do because we’re not going to be any stronger than our so-called
weaker clubs.”
With the
league’s worst record the previous year, Bell’s Eagles had the first pick in
the first draft. The choice was 1935 Heisman Trophy winner Jay Berwanger
from the University of Chicago. Bell promptly traded Berwanger to the Bears
for veteran tackle Art Buss. As it turned
out, Berwanger never played pro football and Bell failed to sign any of his
eight remaining draft picks that year. But the NFL and its draft grew into
an enormous success, as did Bert Bell. He went on to become an outstanding
NFL commissioner from 1946 until his death in 1959. Appropriately,
original-thinker Bell was an original inductee into the Pro Football Hall of
Fame in 1963. (For an
entertaining history of the draft, read Sleepers, Busts, & Franchise
Makers by Cliff Christl and Don Langenkamp.) |