#1450 1936 · National Football League · professional sports
The Worst Team Picks First: A Draft to Save the League
the problem
Big-city teams signed all the best college players; struggling teams folded, threatening the league itself.
background
In the 1930s the NFL's strong clubs outbid everyone for college stars. After a bidding war over Stan Kostka in 1935, Bert Bell, then president of the last-place Philadelphia Eagles, moved a rule change at the league meeting: clubs would select incoming players in reverse order of the previous season's standings, last place first.
The first draft was held on February 8, 1936 at the Ritz-Carlton Hotel in Philadelphia, with nine teams selecting 81 players over nine rounds. Bell's rationale, as he later put it, was that the league would never survive unless each team had a fair shot at talent.
what everyone would do
Let the richest, best-run clubs outbid everyone for college stars.
what they saw
A league sells uncertainty, not championships. Rationing rookie talent to the worst teams is a wealth transfer from the strong that pays every club back in audience: deliberately advantaging losers is how the whole.
the move
Instead of letting the strongest teams outbid everyone for college players, the league collectively controls rookie signing rights and rations them to whoever needs them most: the worst team picks first. Competitive balance is manufactured by allocation rather than money, turning last season's failure into this season's advantage, and the first overall pick, Jay Berwanger, went to the last-place Eagles.
why it works
Fans stop paying when outcomes are foreordained; reverse-order picks inject hope into weak markets every season; and because draft rights precede any bidding, the rationing bites without salary enforcement.
the payoff
Adopted 1936 and never abandoned; the reverse-order draft became the talent-allocation backbone of every major North American league.
where it breaks
It creates perverse incentives, clubs losing on purpose to draft higher; it depends on drafting being an imperfect science, since predictable talent would make the gift too valuable; and without shared revenue binding clubs together, the strong have reasons to defect.
what came after
Copied by the NBA, NHL, MLB and MLS and imitated worldwide; the perennial tanking debate is the mechanism's permanent shadow.
references
- [1]First NFL Draft in 1936 was play drawn up for league survivalPro Football Hall of Fame, 2026profootballhof.com
- [2]1936 NFL Draft: Oral history - Bert Bell's brainchildGreen Bay Packers (Cliff Christl), 2026packers.com