The History of the NFL Draft

By 4Football Staff · October 31, 2026 · 10 min read

The NFL draft began in 1936 as a way to stop the richest teams from signing every top prospect. This is how it grew from a hotel meeting into a three-day television event.

Every spring, millions of people watch a league commissioner walk to a podium and announce which college player a team has chosen. Fans cheer or groan, analysts react within seconds, and the player on screen hugs his family. It is easy to forget that this ritual is an invention, and that for the first decade and a half of the league's existence nothing like it existed.

The draft was created to solve a business problem: how do you keep a league competitive when the best teams can sign the best players? The solution has been revised again and again over almost nine decades, but its core idea has stayed the same. This article tells the story of that solution, from the way players were signed before 1936 to the first draft in a hotel, through the rival leagues, the common draft and the television era, to the structure fans know now. For how the modern draft works step by step, see inside the NFL draft: rounds, order and trades. This article is the history.

Before the Draft: A Free-for-All

In the league's first years there was no system for allocating college players. Any team could approach any player, and the player could sign with whoever offered the best terms. That sounds fair, but it favored the teams with the most money, the best-known coaches and the biggest cities. A team that finished near the bottom had the least to offer a prospect and the most need for talent, and so it kept finishing near the bottom.

The system had other problems. Teams spent money competing against each other for the same player, driving salaries up. Owners were uneasy about the financial instability of the league, and some franchises were struggling to survive.

Bert Bell's Idea

The proposal that changed this came from Bert Bell, an owner of the Philadelphia Eagles, a team that had been among the weakest in the league. Bell suggested in the mid-1930s that the teams hold an annual selection meeting in which they would choose college players in order, with the team that finished last choosing first. Each team would then hold the exclusive right to negotiate with the player it picked. The owners approved the plan in 1935.

The logic was simple. A team that picks first gets the first chance at the best player. Over time, the weakest teams improve and the strongest ones lose some of their advantage. It did not require a salary scale or a rule about spending; it only required that all the teams agree to respect each other's picks. That agreement is the foundation of everything that followed. Bell later became the league's commissioner, and his reputation in the league's history is largely tied to this idea.

The First Draft, 1936

The first draft took place in Philadelphia in February 1936 at a hotel. It lasted nine rounds, a modest number by later standards, and the league had only nine teams. The order was the reverse of the previous season's standings, and the Eagles, who had finished last, held the first pick.

With that pick the Eagles chose Jay Berwanger, a halfback from the University of Chicago who had won the first Heisman Trophy the year before. Berwanger never played in the NFL. The Eagles traded his rights to the Chicago Bears, and the two sides did not reach agreement on a contract. The story is often told as an example of how early pro football lacked the money and glamour of later decades, and how a star could choose another career.

The first draft was not a television event. It was a meeting of owners and team officials, and the choices were announced to a small group. Its influence would build slowly.

The Early Decades: Experiments and Adjustments

Through the 1940s and 1950s, the draft changed in several ways.

• Rounds. The number of rounds grew, and at times in the middle decades the draft ran for twenty or more rounds, long enough that many players selected never had a realistic chance of making a team. The number was reduced over the following decades.
• The bonus pick. For a period from the late 1940s through the 1950s, the league gave one team each year a "bonus" first choice, selected by chance, so that the winner could pick before everyone else. The practice was later dropped.
• Rights and loopholes. Teams sometimes used their picks to hold the rights to players who then moved to other leagues or to the military. Other leagues were beginning to emerge, which changed the balance of power.

The sport itself was changing. As college football's profile grew and television started to carry games into homes, the stakes of a pick rose. A good first-round pick could change a franchise.

The War of the Drafts: The AFL Era

When the American Football League began in 1960, it ran its own draft. For several years, the NFL and the AFL drafted the same players, and the two leagues competed to sign them. The competition drove salaries up and gave players leverage they had never had. Some players were drafted by both leagues and chose between competing offers; some were signed in secret before their college seasons ended; and teams spent heavily on bonuses.

The bidding wars were one of the forces that pushed the leagues toward the merger agreement of 1966. A common draft followed in 1967, in which all of the teams in both leagues selected from a single pool of players. From that point forward, the draft was again a single system. The details of the rivalry are told in the AFL and the NFL: rivalry, merger and the common draft.

Television Finds the Draft

For most of its first four decades, the draft was an insider's event. Newspapers reported the results, and fans who wanted more information read the sports section. The change began in 1980, when a then-new cable sports network began to televise the draft. Coverage started modestly, with a few hours of broadcast and not much analysis, and it grew steadily.

Several things followed from television.

1. A cottage industry of analysts. Commentators, writers and rankings services began to evaluate prospects and publish their predictions. The "mock draft" became a fixture of the football calendar.
2. A bigger audience. The draft went from a niche event to a mainstream one, drawing viewers who followed college football and wanted to see where their favorite players would land.
3. Scheduling. The league moved the event to a weekend and, in 2010, to a three-day format with the first round in prime time on a Thursday evening, the second and third rounds on Friday and the remaining rounds on Saturday. The schedule has been adjusted since, so check the league's calendar for the current plan.
4. Spectacle. The setting moved from hotel ballrooms to theaters and large venues. For decades the draft was held in New York; beginning in 2015 the league began taking the event to different host cities and drawing large crowds of fans.

The shift matters for a historical reason. Television made the draft a showcase for the league in the offseason, a period when it would otherwise be quiet.

Changes to the Structure

Beneath the show, the rules of the draft kept changing.

Each deserves a separate explanation, and several have one. The most important point for a historian is how closely the draft rules track other changes in the league. Compensatory picks came with free agency, and the rookie wage scale came with a new labor agreement. For the free agency side, see how free agency came to the NFL.

The shortened draft and the undrafted player

When the draft had many rounds, the players taken in the late rounds often did not make teams. When it was cut to seven rounds, the players who would have been picked in rounds eight through twelve became undrafted free agents, and teams began signing them in large numbers right after the draft ends. Many undrafted players make rosters each year. The shift changed the meaning of "drafted": it is a signal of how a team values a player, not a requirement for a career.

Why the Rookie Wage Scale Mattered

For much of the draft's history, a team that picked high had to negotiate a contract with its pick, and the two sides could disagree. Before the 2011 labor agreement, the contracts given to the top picks tended to set new records each year, because each year's number one pick wanted to be paid more than the last. Holdouts, in which a drafted player refused to report until a deal was reached, were an occasional result. The rookie wage scale replaced that process with a schedule that sets the pay for each slot in the draft, so that a pick's salary depends on where he was selected rather than on the strength of his bargaining position. The change shifted money from the highest-drafted rookies to veterans and made picks more predictable as assets.

A League of Its Own: Players Who Are Not Drafted

The draft covers players who enter the league through the American college system, but it has never been the only door. Players who are not drafted can sign with any team as free agents, and some of the sport's best-known players entered that way. Players who come from other leagues or from outside the United States are also free to sign with teams. The history of the draft is therefore partly a history of exceptions, and each exception has taught the league something about its own rules.

Trading the Picks

From the beginning, draft picks could be traded, and teams have treated them as currency for decades. Trades of picks for picks, picks for players, and packages of picks for a chance to move up have all become part of the draft's lore.

Some trades became famous because of how lopsided they looked later. In 1989, Dallas traded its star running back to Minnesota for a package of players and draft picks, and the picks became the foundation of a championship run; the deal is still used as a case study. In 1999, New Orleans traded most of its draft, and more, to move up for a single player, a decision that became a cautionary tale about overpaying. Both stories are described in general terms because their details matter less than the lesson, which is that a pick is valuable but not infinitely so.

To make trades more systematic, teams developed tools for pricing picks against each other; the best known is described in the draft trade value chart.

Traditions and Oddities

Over time the draft grew its own traditions.

• Mr. Irrelevant. The player taken with the very last pick in the draft has been nicknamed "Mr. Irrelevant" since the mid-1970s, and some communities hold an annual celebration for him. The name is a joke on how little attention the last pick receives.
• The card. Teams once turned in picks on paper cards, and a runner carried them to the stage. The process has become more digital over time, but the idea of a team "turning in its card" survives in the language.
• The green room. Prospects invited by the league sit with their families, and their reactions are broadcast live. Being invited is a signal of confidence, and waiting for a name to be called can be agonizing.
• Draft day fashion. Players choose suits and accessories that become part of the coverage.

What the Draft Has Not Fixed

A history should be honest about limits. The draft has helped weaker teams, but it has not guaranteed parity. A bad team that picks first still has to evaluate the right player, develop him and surround him with talent, and plenty of high picks have not worked out. Evaluating college players is difficult, and even the best-run teams miss. The draft is a mechanism for fairness at the starting line, not an assurance of success.

There are also arguments about whether the draft is fair to players. Rookies cannot choose their team, and critics note that the system limits their ability to negotiate. Supporters reply that it protects the competitive balance that makes the league popular. Those arguments are as old as the draft itself and are part of the labor relationship between the league and its players.

Following the Draft Today

The draft section of this site shows the order, the prospects and results. You can look at a team's page on teams to see how its roster has been built, and the standings page shows the results that set the order. For the college side, the college section tracks the programs where prospects played.

The Short Version

• Before 1936, any team could sign any college player, which favored wealthy teams.
• Bert Bell proposed the draft; the owners approved it in 1935, and the first draft was held in February 1936.
• The order has always been based on the reverse of the standings, so the weakest teams choose first.
• The AFL's rival drafts and bidding wars led to the common draft of 1967.
• Television began covering the draft in 1980; it became a prime-time, three-day event in 2010 and later left New York for host cities.
• Rounds were cut over time to seven, which created the modern undrafted free agent.
• Supplemental drafts, compensatory picks, a rookie wage scale and eligibility rules were added as the league changed.
• Dates and formats change, so check the league's current calendar for the next draft.