Run to Glory and Profits: The Economic Rise of the NFL during the 1950s

8. The Player Draft

169 8 THE PLAYER DRAFT Bert Bell maintained before Congress that, at a minimum, the nfl owners wanted an antitrust exemption for their player draft. Bell believed the exemption was necessary to ensure his holy grail, competitive balance. Detroit scout Bob Nussbaumer’s statement, made when the Lions had had a run of success but were beginning to deteriorate, must have rung in Bell’s ears: “It’s finally catching up with us. You need good, fresh material each year—and we just haven’t been getting it.”1 Birth of the Player Draft Bell was proud of the player draft; he had proposed it in 1936, when he owned the floundering Philadelphia Eagles. The ostensible purpose was to give weak franchises an opportunity to bid for top-notch collegians without being swamped by New York or Chicago dollars. Bell claimed that aside from the Bears, Giants, Packers, and Redskins, other teams rarely made the championship game. He stated that between 1933 and 1946, the four top teams won 252 games and lost only 59 against the other six teams.2 Because the best players wanted to play with winning teams, they gravitated to the top four clubs. Bell claimed, “The kids would play for less for the [them] than they would for us [Philadelphia].”3 Bell persuaded the owners that the reverse-order draft, in which the “last shall be first,” to quote the biblical injunction, would promote competitive balance. While he attributed the passage of the proposal to the willingness of wealthy owners to help their less fortunate brethren, economists suspect a more self-interested motive: the player draft forces collegiate players to negotiate with only one team, severely limiting the players’ bargaining ability. George Halas, like other owners, discounted the disparity in bargaining 170 The Player Draft strength conferred by the draft; he testified that the system was “completely fair in that it permits a team to select a player for the position it needs the most. This gives to the player who is selected the privilege of playing rather than sitting on the bench and . . . not one of them wants to sit on the bench. The fact that a player has been chosen for a particular position to help strengthen the team which chooses him gives him a high bargaining power for his services.” nfl Players Association lawyer Creighton Miller explained the draft’s rationale differently: “He either plays with the club drafting him or he does not play professional football. . . . Depriving a professional entertainer of his right to choose his employer is an unusual exception to allow in the framework of an American economy which relies on free competition for the determination of where and for whom an individual shall be employed. It can be justified only if to depart from it would destroy the entertainer’s livelihood—a possibility too remote to warrant consideration. This system is employed to equalize competition and minimize salaries.” Miller, though, worried that without some sort of antitrust exemption, even if it “remove[d] one of the few legal remedies presently available to the players, it is apparent that, if this treble damage theory is misused, it can destroy professional football by bankrupting the owners.”4 Bell also extolled the virtues of a secondary draft of players released from the sixty-man preseason rosters. Teams selected these castoffs in reverse order. Bell explained, “When a club selects a player, it must agree to take over the player’s contract at the salary agreed to by the original club and pays $100 waiver price. Players not selected within 48 hours become free agents.”5 Legislators Examine the Draft During congressional hearings, Bell had to admit that the reverse-order player draft did not immediately bestow its blessings upon competitive balance. He cited the fact that some teams exerted scant effort in scouting collegiate players, and therefore fared poorly in the draft.6 Craig Coenen showed that the downtrodden Steelers, Eagles, Cardinals, and Brooklyn Dodgers won just 35.2 percent of their games between 1932 and 1935; these same four teams won 29.1 percent during the first ten seasons with the draft. Only the Washington Redskins showed much improvement in the The Player Draft 171 years following the institution of the draft. The owners themselves tacitly admitted the draft’s inability to bolster weak clubs; they considered denying teams with stronger records their draft picks on rounds two...