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NFL Draft begins with the first round on Thursday in Green Bay

Jay Berwanger posed for a photo in 1934.

The NFL design is broadcast live on television every year, as millions are presented and hundreds of thousands visit more personally to indulge from everything in the Hoopla.

It is far from the modest beginnings of the event when the player did not even know for the first time that it happened and soon left the game without ever earning a cent.

Two hundred quarters of seven players are designed this week in Green Bay, Wisconsin, and anyone who was selected in the first round on Thursday at 8 p.m. Everything was very different in the first year of the draft in 1936, when only 81 players were selected in nine rounds in the opening draft.

There was hardly any doubt that the Halfback from the University of Chicago Jay Berwanger would go first this year. With 6th foot and 195 pounds, the outstanding player in his class had just received the first Heisman trophy and appointed the Big 10 player of the year of the Chicago Tribune.

The Hartford Courant described the first draft as “no gala, more like a penny one poker game. Nine Zigarrenpuffing, Mogul would be wannabular moguler, some of whom made their players paid and persistently attempted to save their dream of professional football.”

Berwanger informed the Courant in 1994 that he was not aware of the design of the Ritz-Carlton Hotel in Philadelphia.

“I found that I was designed by reading in the newspaper,” he said, “I didn’t even know that the design was going on.”

Bert Bell, owner of Philadelphia Eagles, had persuaded his colleagues to formalize a draft in order to set the expensive and “self-destructive” bidding wars for college players, and he had suggested that teams should choose the players in reverse order from the overall route of the previous season. This meant that the worst team, Bell’s own 2-9 Eagles, had first played and Berwanger had selected and quickly treated his rights to the Chicago Bears. The Eagles did not think that they could afford Berwanger’s salary requirements, and the owner and trainer George Halas soon realized that he didn’t have enough money.

According to the Courant, the two met in the lobby of a hotel in the city center in Chicago.

“He asked what I wanted,” remembered Berwanger, “and I had my tongue in my cheek. I told him $ 25,000 for two years. He looked at my date and said:” Nice to have met her; Have a good time tonight. “And that was the end of it.”

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