Inaugural NFL draft was held at the Ritz-Carlton Hotel on this week in Philly history
And the Eagles held the first-ever pick.
More than 20 men crowded into a hotel room at the Ritz-Carlton on South Broad Street in the winter of 1936.
They faced a blackboard listing 90 names of college football players from around the country.
They took seats on the bed and on the bureau and passed around bottles as they kicked off the first draft in NFL history.
Philly’s other famous Bell
Bert Bell pulled the defunct Frankford Yellow Jackets out of bankruptcy, and started a new NFL franchise in Philadelphia in 1933.
His wife, actress Frances Upton Bell, paid her husband’s share of $2,500 (more than $60,000 in today’s money) to seal the deal.
Bell spotted a billboard for Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal, which included the insignia of a bald eagle, and decided this new team should be called the Philadelphia Eagles.
The NFL back then was a nine-team league. And for players it was a free market. The best and brightest could join whichever team they saw fit.
Teams in Green Bay, Chicago, New York, and Washington were the winningest franchises, so that’s where the best players usually signed.
The Eagles were the worst. And in 1935, Bell tried to sign Stan Kostka, a 6-foot-2 fullback from the University of Minnesota. After failing to close the deal, he decided there had to be another way.
Bell came up with an idea whereby each team had a fair shot at the top players. His solution was a draft, in which teams would select from a pool of new players entering the league.
And the key idea: The order of player selection would be in reverse order of the previous year’s standings. So the worst-performing franchise would pick first, and the league champions would pick last.
They called it “the selection of players.” And the first iteration would be held during the owners’ meetings, Feb. 8 and 9, 1936.
It made sense to hold the event in Philadelphia. It was a midway point among the nine cities, and Bell’s father owned the hotel.
On the clock
The Eagles held the first-ever pick in the NFL draft.
They selected Jay Berwanger, Heisman Trophy-winning halfback from the University of Chicago. But his salary demands were high, reported at $1,000 per game. (That would be $25,000 per game today.)
So immediately the team traded him to the Bears for veteran tackle Art Buss.
Berwanger, unimpressed with the Bears’ contract offer, took a job with a rubber company instead.
He never played a minute in an NFL game.
In that hotel room, the nine owners drafted 81 players over nine rounds, kicking off what would become an industry unto itself and the league’s third marquee event, behind the NFL’s opening weekend and the Super Bowl.