The NFL Draft has become quite an event. It's television coverage might even pull more viewers than the playoff games of hockey and basketball. It certainly pulls more viewers than regular season baseball games. The NFL Draft is kind of a big deal. It hasn't always been that way.
The NFL Draft has been a thing since 1936. In all of that time it has spent far more time in the shadows than the light. ESPN televised it's first draft in 1980. That draft started on a Tuesday. Ended on a Wednesday. There weren't a lot of people that even cared. Before ESPN's curious decision to televise the draft anyone interested in it had to wait for the next day's newspapers to find complete coverage. A frustrating time. Through the 1980s and into the 1990s the draft was still more of a sideshow than an event. It finally found a home on the weekends with a twisted, passionate band of followers. Popularity has grown steadily since the late 1990s. The internet has only helped. Now, it's a prime time celebration. ESPN still has it. NFL Network has it as well. We have a choice now. 36 years ago we had none. It's hard to believe that this big event was an afterthought for over 40 years.
The NFL Draft gave Mel Kiper Jr. a career. It even made him a minor, maybe bigger, celebrity. Kiper was probably the best known of the early "draftniks" but he was hardly the first. There were others that came before Kiper. Joel Buchsbaum, Mike Holovak, Palmer Hughes, Carl and Pete Marasco, and Jerry Jones. Not that Jerry Jones. Now there are hundreds being paid to spout their draft thoughts. Millions more that are spouting their thoughts and not getting paid. Every football fan with a computer is a "draftnik" now. Every single one of them is better prepared than the NFL decision-makers during the early days of the draft. The average draft fan today is far more prepared than George Halas, Wellington Mara, Curly Lambeau, and the boys ever were. Some draft day decisions in those dark days were made simply because of the pose struck by a player on the cover of a magazine. Franchise-changing decisions made on a whim. The draft has always been a crap-shoot. It always will be. It was even more so in the days when a magazine cover had such great importance. The scouting process has completely changed in the recent decades. Being able to view film of every single college game has helped the decision-making process. So has having a Scouting Combine to poke, prod, and interview the players. It's a whole new drafting world and the majority of the changes have been in the last half of the draft's existence.
It seems like the importance of the draft in building a team has grown since the 1970s. Perhaps it was the great drafts of the Pittsburgh Steelers in the early 1970s that changed things. The Steelers were a disaster for nearly all of their first 40 years. Chuck Noll comes in and everything changes. Art Rooney Jr. and Bill Nunn Jr. revolutionized the team's scouting and supremely talented players started arriving in bunches. Four Super Bowl wins were the result of the influx of young, talented football players. Other teams tend to notice things like that. It's so easy to see how those Steelers teams were built quickly through a run of excellent drafts. The importance of the NFL Draft for teams and fans has grown each year since.
With the current spectacle that is the NFL Draft it's really difficult to imagine a time when the draft was barely a blip on the NFL calender. It's even more startling that the draft was barely a blip for nearly 40 years. A lot has changed.
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