Chris Berman on the NFL Draft's Humble TV Beginnings on ESPN | Rich's 'This Was SportsCenter'

Chris Berman has seen a lot of firsts at ESPN, and on The Rich Eisen Show's "This Was SportsCenter," he took Rich back to one of the strangest ideas the network ever green-lit: putting the NFL draft on television.

It landed on Berman's desk in the spring of 1980. "First April of 80," he recalled, describing a production that was rudimentary at best. The pitch, as he understood it, came straight from the top, with commissioner Pete Rozelle and Chet Simmons agreeing that the league and the fledgling network should try to televise the draft.

Berman was not the host of that first broadcast. He started with the second one, filling a variety of roles. One year, he explained, ESPN parked him at a New York lunch spot, sending him to Mike Manucci's restaurant at 7th Avenue and 52nd to collect opinions from the sports crowd passing through the Big Apple.

The reason any of it worked, Berman said, came down to timing. "The draft was like an oasis in the middle of a desert," he told Rich. Once the season ended, football went into hibernation until training camps opened. For six months, the draft was the one day that kept fans fed. There were no mock drafts in November back then, and Berman made clear he thinks the modern volume of them is a little much.

That brought the conversation to Mel Kiper. Rich remembered watching Kiper as a college student and being stunned by how directly he went after teams. The archival footage backed him up, with Kiper tearing into a franchise for passing on a quarterback and needling the Colts for picking near the top of the draft instead of contending for a Super Bowl.

The pushback was just as memorable. The old tape rolled a general manager going off on Kiper, questioning who he even was, pointing out that he had never played the game, and rejecting the notion that any team had to draft the players Kiper said they should. It was combustible television, and Berman recognized what it signaled.

"It was obvious that this was becoming not just something for the fans, but it was an industry must-see," Berman said. General managers came on. Coaches reacted. What started as a one-day filler had teeth.

Berman still marvels at how far it has traveled. When ESPN first put the draft on the air, he said, no one imagined it would become the extravaganza it is now. More than 40 years later, the event he helped launch out of a six-month dark period has become one of the biggest weekends on the sports calendar.