HOW BERT BELL DEVISED THE NFL PLAYER DRAFT

How Bert Bell Devised the NFL Player Draft

The idea for a player draft was triggered by an incident that occurred in 1933. That’s when Bert Bell, the founder of the Philadelphia Eagles, telephoned Stanley Kostka, an outstanding Minnesota fullback and linebacker, at his home in Minneapolis.

“I asked him point blank if he would sign with the Eagles if I came out there and offered him a contract for more money than anyone else in the league would give him,” Bell explained. “He said yes. So in the situation, I went to Minneapolis. We met in a hotel. I asked him how much he had been offered by other clubs. He told me the top was $3,500. I’ll give you $4,000, I told him. But Kostka hemmed and hawed, said he had to think it over, give my offer more serious consideration. I told him to take an hour to make up his mind.

“Actually in the situation, I knew what was in his mind. He wanted to get to a telephone and call the club (Brooklyn) which had offered him $3,500 to see if they’d top my offer. Apparently, he couldn’t make the connection because when he came back, he still hadn’t made up his mind. I told him, look, I’ll give you $6,000 if you’ll sign now and let me go home. He hedged. So I left.”

Bell, who later became NFL commissioner, said that he thought about the Kostka situation all the way home. “I made up my mind that this league would never survive unless we had some system whereby each team had an even chance to bid for talent against the other,” he said.

After Bell’s Eagles finished with a 2-9 record in 1935, he set out to convince his fellow owners that only an equitable player draft could save the league from going out of business.

He suggested that at the end of every college football season, the owners pool the names of all eligible seniors, then make their selections in inverse order of the standings, with the lowest team picking first. After a long, contentious debate, his idea was adopted unanimously to become effective for the 1936 season.

As one writer said years later, Bell’s idea for the draft “in fact, has turned out to be the single greatest contributor to the NFL’s prosperity over the past 84 years.”