Chris Berman Explains the Origin of the NFL Draft Broadcast on ESPN

Before the NFL Draft became a three-day prime-time spectacle, it was a one-day curiosity that landed on Chris Berman's desk in the spring of 1980.

Berman pointed to the very beginning. The first televised draft came in late March or early April of 1980, the only one he wasn't involved in, and it was rudimentary. The pitch, as he recalled it, was simple: Pete Rozelle, the commissioner, and Chet Simmons met and decided, "We'd like to televise the NFL draft."

The archival footage tells the rest. There's the welcome from the grand ballroom of the New York Sheraton Hotel, the site of the 1980 National Football League college player draft. There's the remote from Mike Manucci's restaurant at 7th Avenue and 52nd, red and white tablecloths and all, where sports folk in the Big Apple were invited to stop by and give their opinions.

Berman started on the second one. He didn't host it, but he filled a variety of roles, including a year working out of a New York lunch spot.

What he figured out quickly was why it worked. The season ended with the Super Bowl in late January, and then football went into hibernation until training camp opened. "The draft was like an oasis in the middle of a desert," Berman said. For six months, this was the one day fans had.

And it was a different era of analysis. There were no mock drafts in November, which Berman noted has become a little much. The man who built that industry, as the conversation pointed out, is Mel Kiper.

The segment even surfaces a slice of old-school resistance to Kiper's rise, a voice bristling on camera that here was a guy who criticizes every pick, who has the answers on who you should and shouldn't take, and who in his knowledge had never put on a jockstrap or been a player. "We don't have to take anybody that Mel Kiper says we have to take," the clip fumes. The expert class was not universally welcomed.

That tension, of course, was the tell. The draft was becoming not just something for fans but an industry must-see, with general managers and coaches reacting in real time.

Berman still seems a little amazed it grew into what it is. Nobody putting it on the air back then, he said, could have imagined it would become the extravaganza it is more than forty years later. It started as an oasis in football's dark stretch. It never stopped being one.