The draft that can leave clubs out in the cold

Ron Borges looks at a lottery which will keep American football fans fixated for two days.

Last season's first pick. Michigan's Jake Long, right, here with NFL commissioner Roger Goodell, was selected by the Miami Dolphins.

The three-time Super Bowl winning coach Bill Belichick is widely considered to be one of the best talent evaluators in the National Football League and as adept a Draft Day operative as there is in pro football. Yet when he is asked to explain how he makes his decisions during the annual two-day draft of the best college football talent in the United States his answer sounds nothing like what you might expect.

"Ultimately you have to put your chips on some number and that's the one you pick," Belichick said. "With college players there are so many variables. A lot of things lead to a lot of guesstimates. You don't have the evidence that you'd have if you took a player from another NFL team so it's a very inexact science." That is how someone like Tom Brady, the two-time Super Bowl MVP, ends up having 198 players selected ahead of him nine years ago or Johnny Unitas, universally regarded as the best quarterback to play pro football, is taken in the ninth round and then cut before taking a snap in a game by the Pittsburgh Steelers in his rookie season of 1955 before finally landing with the then Baltimore Colts a year later.

Mistakes like those are made every year despite all the money and time spent to avoid them because this inexact but very expensive "science" is really little more than a lottery in shoulder pads. By the time it finishes tomorrow evening, 224 of the best college football players in the US will have been allocated to the 32 NFL franchises, primarily on the basis of the worst team drafting first and the best last. Not one of those teams will be sure of what they have.

Started in 1936 at the suggestion of then Philadelphia Eagles' owner and future NFL commissioner Bert Bell as a way to even out the talent and prevent the wealthier franchises from signing the bulk of the young talent every year, it has long been considered the great levelling process. In no other occupation does the most talented person coming out of college have to go to work for the worst company in his field, an odd infringement on personal rights that could only be explained away - or tolerated - in the world of professional athletics.

For decades the NFL draft has existed as an odd anomaly in a country founded on the principle of personal freedom because there is nothing free about it, either for the teams involved or the players who lose all rights to sell their talents to the highest bidder because there are no bidders. You go where you are told, for better or for worse. Today the draft is a high-tech science of testing, measuring, filming, computer analysis and re-analysis. It is a month-long television extravaganza that culminates in two days of nearly round-the-clock coverage on ESPN and every local station in the country. It is, frankly, weird, this obsession with the selection of more than 200 players, most of whom are barely known by fans of the teams who select them.

There are exceptions, of course, but after the first two or three rounds of the seven-round draft the players taken are all the kind of gambles Belichick was talking about. "There were times when I was close to just going up to the stadium and quitting football," recalled Irving Fryar, who in 1984 was the first overall pick in the draft. "If you're the No 1 pick you have to come right in and be IT. If you're No 1 people expect more than you can accomplish. People are watching you with a magnifying glass because you're supposed to change the whole situation by yourself.

"You get caught up in other people's expectations. You want to do well and if you don't, you feel you're letting everyone down. Then the doubts start and you begin to question your talent and things can get out of control. When that happens, it's a long haul back." Ultimately, Fryar played 17 years in the NFL, going to the Pro Bowl five times, but his greatest years were not with the team who made him that draft's first pick, the Patriots. It was not until he escaped to Miami and Philadelphia that he blossomed, places where the weight of expectation was lighter.

That weight falls equally on the player and the people who select him. Bobby Bethard was the general manager who built the great Washington Redskins Super Bowl teams coached by Joe Gibbs. He was deservedly considered one of the greatest talent evaluators in NFL history yet when he picked the wrong quarterback for the San Diego Chargers in 1998 his career came to a crashing halt and his team were set back for a decade.

That year, the decision about who the draft's first pick would be came down to Peyton Manning and Ryan Leaf. Bethard, like most general managers, favoured Manning, but in the end was faced with a dilemma. Unable to make a trade to get to the No 1 spot, he was forced to decide if he would take Leaf, about whom far less was known, or leave his team without a franchise quarterback for a safer pick? "You go into a draft hoping to get better," Bethard told Sporting News. "This was our moment. This was our chance. We might never have another chance to get a franchise quarterback."

So Bethard traded two first-round picks, a second and two players to Arizona to move up just one notch to No 2 and take Leaf. He would live to rue that decision because Leaf turned into perhaps the biggest bust in draft history. While Manning became one of pro football's greatest quarterbacks, Leaf was 4-17 as a starter, throwing more than twice as many interceptions as touchdowns. The first man ever taken in the draft, a University of Chicago running back named Jay Berwanger in 1936, chose not to play pro football at all because he was offered a job as a sportswriter by the Chicago Daily News. The job paid US$100 a week (DH367), which was more than most football players were making in those Depression days, so Berwanger grabbed it. He would never play a down in the NFL.

No one would think of doing such a thing today because top draft choices are paid millions and even lowly seventh-round choices would be loath not to take the chance of joining America's sporting obsession. Yet neither the draft nor pro football really took hold in the US until the 1960s when an upstart rival called the American Football League came along and began to challenge the NFL for young talent. Soon the two leagues were battling and salaries escalated. So too did intrigue.

In 1959, a star running back from Louisiana State University named Billy Cannon was drafted illegally by the NFL while still in college and signed with the Los Angeles Rams. Bud Adams, who owned the AFL's Houston Oilers, got wind of it and tracked Cannon down, offering him double what he'd been promised. According to Adams, who still owns the Tennessee Titans, 22 minutes after that offer was delivered Cannon agreed to a contract he later signed under the goal post at the Sugar Bowl following the final game of his college career.

Soon teams in both leagues began to "stash" college players, hiding them from scouts from the rival league for days before their two drafts. One of the best at it was Gil Brandt, a legendary college scout for the Dallas Cowboys, often hiding players in out of the way motels under assumed names for days. Finally, amidst a salary war, the two leagues merged in 1966 and began a common draft, returning to the monopolistic days the owners favoured. That's held true to this day.

Unlike today's high-tech scouting systems, in the early years few teams even had scouts, many making their selections from annual college football magazines, word of mouth and the recommendations of high school and college coaches. Perhaps one of the greatest products of that system was a offensive lineman named Roosevelt Brown, who was selected on the 27th round by the New York Giants in 1953. In those days college football was, like much of America, a segregated proposition so Brown played at a small, all-black college. Little was known about him but someone in the Giants' front office had read a newspaper story about a 6ft 3in, 16st kid from this all black college and passed his name along.

Not having anyone else on their list by that stage of the draft, the Giants took him and were shocked when Brown showed up and was 18st, fast, muscular, athletic and so talented he would play 13 years and be elected to the Hall of Fame in 1975. Of the 320 players drafted ahead of him in 1953, only six would join him in the Hall. There are many stories like Brown, Unitas and Brady, guys unwanted who became legendary players. There are also stories of what might have been, like the famous 1983 "Quarterback Draft" when six quarterbacks were taken in the first round but the best got away. John Elway, the Denver Broncos' Hall of Fame quarterback, was universally acclaimed the best player in that draft and it turned out the scouts were right. The person who wasn't was Robert Irsay, who owned the Baltimore Colts and the No 1 pick.

Elway insisted he would not play in Baltimore, threatening to play baseball instead. Then Colts' general manager Ernie Accorsi drafted him anyway, but when Elway continued to resist, Irsay panicked and traded him to Denver. "I was not going down in history as the guy who traded John Elway," Accorsi said after quitting in protest. Brady was selected by the Patriots 58 players after they picked a tight end from Boise State named Dave Stachelski, who never played a down.

Patriots' personnel director Scott Pioli, who is now general manager of the Kansas City Chiefs, still keeps Stachelski's name on his desk to remind him of what the draft is all about. "Any time I start to think I'm smart, I look at Dave's name and remember I drafted him ahead of Tom Brady," Pioli jokes. Of all the wacky trades ever made, the oddest came in 1999 when then New Orleans head coach Mike Ditka shipped his entire draft - six picks that year and a first and third the next - to the Washington Redskins to acquire a running back named Ricky Williams. Although Williams would have several 1,000 yard seasons his production never justified that sacrifice. So wedded to its outcome was Ditka that he and Williams, dressed in a wedding gown, had their picture taken together for a magazine cover.

"I'd spent the whole year scouting all over the country," recalled then Saints' scout Tom Marino. "I put in thousands of hours travelling, writing reports, looking at guys and evaluating them and Ditka walks in and in five minutes I don't have anything to do for two days but watch TV. Our draft was over." That is the risk you run on Draft Day in the NFL. Careers, reputations and teams can be built or destroyed when, for two days each April, The Great American Sporting Lottery - the NFL Draft - fixates a nation.