NFL Draft

The NFL Draft is a yearly venture where the cream of the college football crop are systematically selected by professional NFL teams.

The draft consists of seven rounds. The draft takes place over a three-day period, with the first round on Thursday, rounds 2-3 on Friday, and the remaining rounds 4-7 on Saturday. ESPN has been largely responsible for the increasing popularity of this event, because they own the rights to televise it; as such, the NFL has started awarding cities the right to host the draft as it does the Super Bowl.

Drafting order is strictly based on the football team's prior year standings (the NFL does not use a "lottery" system featuring non-playoff teams like the NBA and NHL to determine draft order, with the non-playoff teams selecting first (selections 1-18, the team with the worst overall record gets the #1 pick), followed by wild-card round losers (19-24), divisional round losers (25-28), conference runners-up (29-30), the Super Bowl runner-up (31) and the Super Bowl champion (32). In the event two teams have the same record, a tiebreaker system is used with overall strength of schedule percentage as the first tiebreaker (the team with the lower percentage gets the higher selection).

Teams which lose players due to free agency are awarded "compensation" picks, which are placed at the end of rounds 3-7; the placement of a pick depends on a proprietary formula taking into account annual salary (which gets the most weight), playing time, and postseason awards; only 32 such picks are granted in a season (twice, where a player was signed on the belief that a compensatory pick would be granted but it was later discovered the player wasn't eligible due to league error, the league granted an extra 33rd pick), and are awarded roughly one month before the draft. Beginning in 2021 the NFL also added compensatory picks (not counted toward those involving players) to teams who had a qualified minority candidate (defined as a candidate who has been with the losing team for at least two years, was not already the head coach or "primary football executive" of the losing team, and no break in employment between the clubs) hired by another team into those positions (for the next two years for one candidate, three years for two or more); these picks take place at the end of round 3.

Unlike other sports leagues (such as MLB), the NFL allows for teams to freely trade picks for other picks or players. Also the NFL can and has stripped teams of draft choices due to violations of league rules (notably, the New England Patriots have twice lost first round picks, one for illegally videotaping other teams and again for the Deflate-gate scandal).

Each team has a limited time to make a selection (ten minutes in round 1, seven minutes in round 2, five minutes in rounds 3-6, and four minutes in round 7). If a team fails to make a choice within the allotted time, a team can still submit a choice; however, the next team has the right to pick beforehand and could possibly choose a player the other team wanted. There is one exception to this rule: a team cannot pass in order to make the final selection in the draft (referred to as "Mr. Irrelevant") due to that player being given an "award" for the honor (the award consists of the Lowsman Trophy, which looks like the Heisman except the player is fumbling a football).

National Football League Drafts 1990s |  | 1990 | 1991 | 1992 | 1993 | 1994 | 1995 | 1996 | 1997 | 1998 | 1999

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2000s |  | 2000 | 2001 | 2002 | 2003 | 2004 | 2005 | 2006 | 2007 | 2008 | 2009

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