The Cleveland Browns and the origins of the NFL Draft: Part 1

Brown had won six state championships while head coach of Massillon (OH) High School and then coached two years at Ohio State, winning a national championship there before enlisting in the Navy during the war effort.

Coach Brown knew all of his former players at Massillon and Ohio State, plus all of his team’s opponents during that time. So, he was aware of the skill value of hundreds of players. QB Otto Graham had played against Brown at Northwestern University. WR Dante Lavelli and OT/K Lou Groza were Ohio State alumni. DT Lou Rymkus had played against Brown while at Notre Dame. FB Marion Motley had played for Brown on the Great Lakes Navy team. DE Bill Willis was on Coach Brown’s national championship squad at Ohio State. LB Lou Saban had played against Brown while attending Indiana.

In the maiden season of 1946, the Browns were formed by the players Coach Brown contacted and assembled into a roster. Basically, he cherry-picked and formed a monster roster that finished 12-2-0 and defeated the New York Yankees 14-9 in the championship game.

The advantage for Coach Browns was not only his knowledge of players, but the fact that he didn’t have to go through any sort of draft to assemble his roster. He simply made an offer, signed them, and they played.

That is not how it works today in the NFL.

The 2026 edition of the NFL draft fast approaches. Although the process of free agency can fill holes and provide quality depth, teams are built through the draft.

Think about it: NFL rosters are 53-players. If a club keeps every first, second, and third round draft picks for three years, that is nine players, or 17% of the roster. Four years’ worth is 22%, whereas five years of good draft picks equals 28.3%. That is over half of the team.

But there is an asterisk to be placed on those numbers. That only applies if every draft pick sticks, which is almost impossible and improbable. Players succeed and have fruitful careers, while other guys come and go.

NFL teams build their roster in numerous ways. First, selecting college players via the draft. Secondly, signing free agents during the free agency period. Thirdly, trades for players with other clubs. In fourth place, is clubs can claim players off the waiver wire. Another method is by signing players who participated in another pro football league whose contract has expired.

Lastly, the signing of football players who are currently unemployed and don’t have any college eligibility remaining. After the NFL draft, there are hundreds of college players who weren’t selected and can be signed to a roster. After each NFL season, there are also hundreds of players whose contracts have expired and were not re-signed by their respective teams, and subsequently are labeled as “free agents.” This could also be your dentist who was a college star and now has decided he wants to play pro ball, or the kid a scout found kicking 60-yard field goals over in Europe.

These individuals are of-age and are available. These types of athletes can be signed at any time, whereas the first four types have their own parameters and rules regarding the signing of a player contract.

College football teams are built by a simple resolution: Coaching staffs make offers to a list of players they have earmarked as those they want on their football team. Those players then make the decision of which scholarship offer to accept. In the end, it is the high school athlete who makes the definitive decision.

Not so for the NFL. As stated, there are restrictions for roster building. Teams can’t simply call up a college athlete, offer him a contract, and then write him a big check and sign him.

In today’s NFL, after a college football player has used his eligibility or signs up as an early prospect for the draft, NFL clubs have a process for which players are placed on rosters.

The NFL draft. But it wasn’t always this process. To be factual, there wasn’t a process in place at all.

Beginnings

Originally, the league was formed in 1920 and called the “American Professional Football Association” (APFA) and began with 19 teams. In 1922, the APFA changed its name to the “National Football League.”

The APFA was formed for three distinct reasons: 1) to have a consistent scheduling system for member teams, 2) to have rosters where players could not jump from team to team every week, and 3) to have rosters devoid of college players playing under assumed names for pro teams.

Almost every member club was a medium or small-town team. In that first season, the only large cities represented were the Chicago Cardinals, Detroit Heralds, and Cleveland Tigers. Teams were mostly made up of athletic club members and also included some college football players, but were mainly butchers, firefighters, coal miners, construction workers, and other rugged blue-collar workers.

And because these men played for a team such as Rochester (NY), Toledo (OH), Decatur (IL), or Rock Island (NY), these men lived in those cities, usually for most of their lives. They represented their area on the gridiron and were proud of their city.

And if a guy played for a college football team that lived nearby, usually he was added to the roster in order to increase local interest.

But as the years rolled along, some teams began to recruit college football players instead of using the police officer that patrolled the streets of their town. These players knew the game. They had experience and knowledge, and perhaps success at the college level. So, instead of inserting the iron worker or the meat cutter, teams would recruit guys who had played for several seasons for very good college teams.

All these NFL clubs had to do was contact the college player and offer them a contract. On the final game of their college season, usually on the Saturday of the Thanksgiving weekend, the athlete would sign and play the following day and the remainder of the pro season, which ended at the end of December.

More college players found that they could make better money upon graduation playing pro ball than entering the workforce.

As years rolled along, the teams that weren’t doing well began to use this same strategy. The mill worker or the carpenter just couldn’t compete with the guys who played for Illinois, Penn State, Yale, or Brown. It came to the point where all NFL clubs were using former college players.

And that is how NFL teams were constructed. Just like college teams that approached high schoolers with scholarships, the pro clubs met up with college players with contract offers.

The issue

The medium-sized city teams began to use more college players, but also a roster of men who lived and worked in their city. So, a team located in Muncie, Indiana, still used construction workers as its roster core.

The league as a whole began to shift. In 1922, the Decatur Staleys moved to Chicago and became the Bears. In 1925, a team was formed in New York City and named itself after the city’s baseball team, the Giants. St. Louis now had a team called the All-Stars, along with the Milwaukee Badgers.

Slowly, the landscape of the small to medium cities was disappearing. That is because NFL Commissioner Joe Carr wanted to weed out the smaller cities and begin building a league of larger city clubs. He felt that this would become the only method to make the league into a bigger league and not look like a minor league circuit.

The Boston Braves came onto the scene. In 1933, both the Philadelphia Eagles and Pittsburgh Pirates entered the fray. The Portsmouth (OH) Spartans relocated to Detroit and became the Lions. A team entered playing in Brooklyn (NY) called the Dodgers.

But there was a problem. Actually, a huge concern.

Every year, the same teams played for the championship: New York Giants, Chicago Bears, Green Bay Packers, Boston/Washington Redskins, and Portsmouth Spartans/Detroit Lions.

Back then, baseball was the King of Sports. Everyone played baseball as a kid, everyone watched baseball as an adult, and everyone loved baseball. These pro football teams played their home games in baseball stadiums because of the large seating capacity.

The Bears played at Wrigley Field, capacity 41,649. The Giants played at the Polo Grounds, which could seat 55,000. The Boston Redskins found Fenway Park to be their home, which could bring in 37,755. Green Bay’s stadium sat 25,000, and when they played a home game in Milwaukee, when the Braves moved in, that venue seated 36,000. Tiger Stadium in Detroit could sell 52,416 tickets.

These teams could offer larger contracts to the elite college players every year because their home gates were always good. They made money, and so, could offer more. The other clubs in the league ended up with the bottom third of the incoming college football talent.

Even if one of the lower-tier NFL clubs offered a special player a very good contract, all one of the other teams had to do was top it, which eliminated the bottom-feeder team from negotiations. These same five clubs all had big stadiums to fill and needed big college names to bring in the crowds. And it seemed like every year, one of these five would either be competing for the division title, winning the NFL crown, or playing for it.

Teams like the Pirates, Eagles, Cardinals, Staten Island Stapletons, Providence Steam Roller, Minneapolis Red Jackets, Newark Tornadoes, Cleveland Rams, and Dayton Triangles would take a backseat to those other clubs on the field and ultimately at the box office.

In those days, the home team kept 60% of the gate while the visitor got 40%. Tickets, program sales, and concessions were the majority of each home team’s revenue stream. Several clubs made more money on game day as the losing visitor at 40% net versus the home stand rate of 60% because of the huge crowds.

The idea for a player draft

Each year, the objective of every NFL team was to break even or make any amount of profit. Just the way it was. Keeping afloat was a huge goal.

The Stapletons folded because of the Great Depression. After the Cincinnati Reds went 3-6-1 and 0-8-0 in consecutive seasons, they could not pay their league team dues and simply folded. The Eagles lost $80,000 during one season and went bankrupt, and then were sold for $4,500 to a sportsman named Bert Bell.

After a few seasons as the owner of the Eagles, Bell became frustrated that all the great college players would only sign with a handful of teams, whereas squads like his own could only hire the marginal athletes and basically the leftovers that never heard from the upper five clubs.

Yet another issue was that two or more teams would get into bidding wars with each other for the same player. And of course, franchises like Bell’s Eagles were perennial bottom-dwellers and were almost always outbid.

Every year, it seemed that the rich got richer and the poor became poorer with the roster as well as at the box office. Bell felt that the current system was broken.

His breaking point was when he attempted to sign a cherished, squarely built 6-foot, 225-pound fullback/linebacker from Minnesota named Stan Kostka, whose nickname was “King Kong.” Most players at the time were making between $3,500 to $4,500 a season. But Kostka played the game with several teams.

One team offered him a $3,500 deal, to which Kostka sent a wire back that the Bears had offered $4,000. Each team he negotiated with, he kept that up with mostly $500 increments, until finally one team offered him a $5,000 deal.

Bell drove all the way to Minneapolis and offered Kostka a $6,000 contract, an unheard-of number for the time. The three other NFL clubs that were in the mix, one outbid Bell and subsequently signed Kostka.

The Eagles had limited financial resources. Signing Kostka would have shot his entire college talent endowment, but Bell considered that Kostka would greatly help his team, and his notoriety would bring in more bodies on game days. Bell became frustrated at how rosters were built and how the teams with the largest stadiums got all the best college football players.

Bell also realized that teams ended up overpaying for college talent, with the sheer capacity to get into bidding wars with each other. He had an idea, and made up his mind that the league needed parity, otherwise, the lesser teams would – and have – folded because of bad attendance with poor talent.

At the NFL owners’ meeting in 1935, Bell decided to make a suggestion to change how teams accumulated their rosters. His idea was that at the end of each season, a list would be compiled of all eligible college seniors and that a selection process would take place in reverse order of the previous year’s standings.

Five league teams that made money, had the largest crowds, and signed the best college football talent annually would be the most affected if a system like this were to be instituted and take place every year.

Would the league owners go for this idea? Would the influential and powerful NFL owners strike it down?

Part 2 will complete the story. Stay tuned.