Considering the spectacle that the NFL draft has become over its 86-year history, the 2022 version in Las Vegas represents a consummate marriage of subject and city. Top prospects are strutting across a red-carpet platform built atop the Bellagio fountain. A pop-up plaza in the spinning shadow of the High Roller Ferris wheel is hosting what thedescribed as “the largest draft theater area” ever. Half a million fans are projected to attend, while three days of road closures reportedly mark the “longest traffic shutdown of the Strip to date.”
All told, the gaudy scene is a far cry from what the draft used to be—which is to say, pretty long and pretty boring for everyone involved. The first televised draft, on ESPN in 1980, paved the way for the current era of year-round mock drafts, prime-time broadcasts and custom-tailored suits. But as former NFL coach Weeb Ewbank once told the , “In the old days, when there were 30 rounds, you’d see some pretty strange picks. We’d get to the 20th round and guys would start looking through the football magazines for names to pick.”
What began in 1943 to counteract the inevitability that many eligible players would be called into combat service instead, the now-unfathomable 30-round draft dragged on as the standard through the end of the ’50s. “Whom didn’t they draft?” Tony Kornheiser later wrote in . “Dame Margot Fonteyn?” But even a subsequent return to the pre–World War II norm of 20 did little to lessen the humdrum task that was picking in deeper rounds.
No shortage of anecdotes reflect what the dubbed this antiquated, pre-Hollywood-ization period, with player names “chalked on a blackboard—often illegibly” and pick time “kept by a small, hand-wound watch.” And so it’s ironic (or maybe prophetic) that the most emblematic one from this forgotten genre features a cast of characters straight out of a script: a football coach with a Hollywood background; a Hollywood icon with a football background; and a college running back who went nearly 50 years before discovering that he was involved at all.
