How the NFL Draft made the league what it is today ... and became a fan phenomenon

As a teenager in Mount Carmel, Pennsylvania, part of Brett Veach’s persona was what one friend called “a stat geek.”

The stellar football player who would become the Chiefs’ general manager had an acquired knack for retaining and reciting endless data about the pro and college games. He even was into the then-few forms of the mock draft that now saturate the landscape.

With his friend Mike Boyer, a sports attorney and NFL agent, Veach liked to go back and forth naming players on any given team in descending order of prominence until one was stumped. No doubt that background is why the two are still inclined to sign emails to each other with the name of an obscure player from yesteryear … and why Veach’s hometown friends seem to consider the actual NFL Draft an extension of their childhood and are apt to text advice when the Chiefs are on the clock.

All of that speaks to why Veach is as aware as anyone of how the event has morphed from the stuff of draftniks and most intense of fans to a phenomenon.

With Union Station and the National WWI Museum and Liberty Memorial at the epicenter, more than 100,000 NFL fans who had registered by last week — and possibly significantly more — are expected for the three-day spectacle that begins Thursday.

“It’s just absolutely amazing from where this has gone to now traveling all over across the country and allowing cities to put on a great performance,” he said.

If it’s a long way from what Veach understood it to be in the mid-1990s, it’s a galaxy from where it began as a foundational factor in the competitive balance that animates the NFL.

And what it has become reflects the league’s acumen with marketing and commodifying a brand that it has managed to create relevance — or at least flash — across the calendar in ways contemporary enterprises can only envy.

Instead of the sense of a barren offseason, the NFL has created what feels like an “oasis,” as my estimable friend Michael MacCambridge put it.

“You’ve got this in sort of a three-act play with the Combine and free agency leading into the draft, and shortly thereafter, the release of the schedule, which gets people hyped up for the next season,” said MacCambridge, author of the acclaimed “America’s Game” and the forthcoming “The Big Time: How the 1970s Transformed Sports in America.”

“The league is no stronger than its weakest link”

The centerpiece and hinge of it all is the draft, which averaged 5.2 million television viewers across all three days last year after drawing more than 10 million for the first round, and the ancillary NFL Draft Experience

Which wasn’t anything then-Philadelphia Eagles owner Bert Bell might have envisioned when he raised a motion at the May 1935 NFL owners meeting at the Fort Pitt Hotel in Pittsburgh.

After a 2-9 finish, Bell was becoming increasingly worried about competitiveness and even viability in a “first-come, free-for-all, where owners just offered the most money to the best college players leaving school,” as Chris Willis, head of the NFL Films Research Library, wrote.

So Bell, later the NFL Commissioner, made a radical proposal.

“Gentlemen, I’ve always had the theory that pro football is like a chain. The league is no stronger than its weakest link, and I’ve been a weak link for so long that I should know,” he said per “On Any Given Sunday,” Robert Lyons’ biography on Bell. “Every year the rich get richer, and the poor get poorer.”

Noting that New York, Washington, Chicago and Green Bay’s control of the top of the league was a self-perpetuating cycle, he proposed pooling eligible seniors at the end of every season and making “our selections in inverse order of the standings.”

Easy for him to say.

But, crucially, the eight other owners present that day embraced the broader point.

According to research by Willis, Bears’ owner George Halas thought the proposal was “sound” and “made sense.” So did Giants owner Tim Mara, who like Halas had about more to lose than anyone.

“People come to see competition; we could give them competition only if the teams had some sort of equality,” said Mara, who recognized that accepting that “hazard” for his own franchise was a necessity for the benefit of the league.

So the draft, known initially as the “selection of college players,” commenced in February 1936 in stark contrast to what we know today.

“The Dark Ages” of the NFL Draft

At Philadelphia’s Ritz-Carlton Hotel, according to an NFL.com telling of the history of the draft, “clubs selected from a pool of only 90 players. There were no formal scouting departments, no agents and no 24-hour sports media coverage. The list of eligible players was compiled from newspaper reports, visits to local colleges by team executives, and recommendations to front-office personnel.”

Also reflecting distinctions between the eras: Only 24 of the 81 players selected in the first draft went on to play in the NFL.

When his salary requirement of $25,000 for two seasons was declined, the overall No. 1 pick, Heisman Trophy winner Jay Berwanger, embarked on a career as a foam-rubber salesman and later served in the U.S. Navy in World War II.

Over the decades, the league and the draft evolved in shape, scale and scope as scouting sprouted and the league merged with the AFL after its ferocious and colorful bidding wars with the upstart league that gave birth to the Dallas Texans/Kansas City Chiefs — a story in itself.

But even in the first years after the merger following the 1969 season, the draft wasn’t exactly a mainstream fascination.

“When I was growing up in Kansas City, the NFL Draft was a newspaper story,” MacCambridge said as he spoke of the experience many of us of a similar age can remember. “If you were really tuned into pro football, you knew beforehand that the draft was coming up. But you only knew that because Pro Football Weekly had like one story in its post-Super Bowl issue about: ‘Here are 20 guys who will probably go high in the draft.’ And maybe the beat writer at The Star would say, ‘The Chiefs are looking for these guys.’

“But the day of the draft could sneak up on you. If you were lucky, you got home from school, you could turn on the radio and find some report. Or … if you couldn’t wait, you would call the sports desk and some surly copy editor would say, ‘Yes, they took Woody Green from Arizona State,’ and then hang up on you.

“And then the next day, there would be one story on who the Chiefs’ top couple draft picks were, and then like 30 inches of agate showing which players went to which teams …

“So it was truly the Dark Ages.”

ESPN becomes involved with the draft

By the end of the decade, coverage was steadily becoming more prominent and comprehensive. But the springboard to what we see today began shortly after the inception of ESPN in 1979.

Soon thereafter, Bill Rasmussen, ESPN co-founder and its first president and CEO, approached NFL Commissioner Pete Rozelle with a seemingly absurd idea: “We want to televise the NFL Draft.”

As related by MacCambridge, whose upcoming book delves into the meeting, the ever-savvy Rozelle was perplexed and stressed to Rasmussen that there are no players or coaches at the event.

“‘There’s just team reps on phones, and then I walk up to a podium and announce the selection,’” Rozelle explained.

But Rasmussen and ESPN saw something more, both in the immediate and the possible by priming the landscape. It didn’t just cover “a bunch of suits” in a ballroom. Its crews went around New York speaking to people and planted some of the seeds being sown now.

“You began to see this kind of really avid fan emerging,” MacCambridge said, by way of example pointing to “a Giants fan saying, ‘Well, we need help at this position. And I like this guy from this school.’”

In those moments, he added, you could picture “sort of the DNA of what the draft would become” and the enticing “what’s under the Christmas tree for your particular team” element.

Even in those early televised years, MacCambridge said, some fans attended — whether it was to lend support or boo the picks they didn’t like, as Veach joked he “probably” would have done if he’d been at one of the events and took issue.

The energy around it escalated as the event grew, both in terms of access and showmanship, to further accommodate the passion.

By way of comparison, MacCambridge drew a line from Archie Manning being drafted second overall in 1971, getting that news in the Ole Miss sports information office and then heading to morning classes, to the case of Charles Rogers being drafted second overall in 2003.

By then, the notion of getting players to the green room had been fully engaged to add what MacCambridge called “a kind of dating game drama to the whole process.”

Rogers arrived in New York with an entourage of 97 people.

“It had become a place where not just the name, not just the stats but where the personality of the player was introduced to a national television audience,” he said.

“Hope springs eternal”

As it rose in attendance and ratings with the event in New York from 1965-2014, the NFL astutely recognized that it could put the draft up for bid around the country. It’s reaped the benefits for itself and the game while providing a mega-event cities are eager to seize for exposure and economic impact.

In large measure, that development reflects two of the things the NFL does best: put on a show and promote competitiveness through such measures as the salary cap, scheduling and the draft.

“In the NFL, no matter how miserable you are, there is hope,” MacCambridge said, later adding, “That sense that if my team knocks it out of the park with this draft, kills these two needs and gets somebody who’s a dark horse or a sleeper, we could be competitive next year.

“Hope springs eternal. That’s so much of what the NFL Draft is about.”

We’ll see for ourselves this week at an event Veach relishes and thrives in now but would have gone crazy for as a teen who would have been there every day.

He can appreciate it from that standpoint even now.

“There will certainly be a kid out there in the crowd that will either be a player or a front office member one day,” he said. “And I think they will probably use this experience that the NFL has provided to really spark that interest.”