Events Four Decades Ago Created Today’s NFL Draft Spectacle

Fans, Did You Know? The 1983 NFL Draft Changed Pro Sports Forever

If you’re tuning in to ABC, ESPN, or the NFL Network over the next three days to watch your favorite teams select players for the upcoming season, you might not realize how events held 40 years ago this week helped shape the NFL draft and pro sports in general.

Over the course of April 26 and April 27, 1983, that year’s draft transformed football into the all-consuming spectacle it is today. Events in the ballroom of the New York Sheraton would also presage a coming era of not just enriched but emboldened professional athletes.

Empowered Players

The 1983 NFL draft featured a record six quarterbacks selected in the first round. Four of them (John Elway, Dan Marino, Jim Kelly, and Tony Eason) would go on to start in the Super Bowl over 11 of the following 16 years, practically defining an era of football.

The way in which fully one-quarter of the league (i.e., seven of the 28 teams then in existence) selected a new starting quarterback illustrated how the position had morphed into arguably the most important in all professional team sports. The hope that can accompany a new quarterback provided curiosity and intrigue for numerous teams and their followers heading into the 1983 draft. It also provided high drama over the first quarterback selected, and the first player drafted overall.

An acclaimed prodigy from Stanford University, John Elway had little interest in playing for the Baltimore Colts, who held the first pick in the 1983 draft. Elway and his father, Jack, thought they had reached a gentleman’s agreement with the Colts’ ownership that would see Baltimore trade the top pick, so Elway could play elsewhere. But with dysfunctional management and temperamental owner Frank Kush failing to reach a trade agreement before the draft, Baltimore selected Elway anyway.

What happened next set a new precedent. Elway, encouraged by his agent Marvin Demoff, announced on the afternoon of the draft that he would refuse to play for the Baltimore Colts, and would instead take up an offer from the New York Yankees, with whom he had already signed a contract, to play professional baseball full-time.

As recounted in the ESPN 30 for 30 documentary “Elway to Marino,” which chronicles the 1983 draft, Elway’s power play brought him no small amount of criticism. Terry Bradshaw, the future Hall of Famer