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. That is done through the NFL draft.
But it wasn’t always this process. To be factual, there wasn’t a process in place at all.
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.”
Almost every member club was a medium or small-town team. 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 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. 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.
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 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. Slowly, the landscape of the small to medium cities was disappearing.
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. These pro football teams played their home games in baseball stadiums because of the large seating capacity. 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.
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.
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 Philadelphia Eagles were owned by a sportsman named Bert Bell. He 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 offered a player a $6,500 deal and then was outbid. The Eagles had limited financial resources. Signing that fullback would have shot his entire college talent endowment.
Bell realized that teams ended up overpaying for college talent, with the sheer capacity to get into bidding wars with each other. And the lesser teams had no chance at the top talent. 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 instigated and take place every year.