Draft is past snore stage

There were no television cameras watching, no plethora of websites providing instant analysis, as the 1985 NFL draft stretched late into the night.

A young scout back then, Pat Kirwan was sitting at the Tampa Bay Buccaneers table, taking calls from team headquarters and relaying picks to the podium, when the telephone rang with a strange voice on the line.

It was the Buffalo Bills.

“Are you sitting next to our table?” the caller asked. “Is our guy there?”

The Bills’ representative had dozed off. With the clock ticking down, Kirwan had to jostle him awake and start filling out Buffalo’s card.

“That was before all the hype,” Kirwan said. “Before the draft got a life of its own.”

More than two decades later, as the league’s 32 teams assemble in New York this weekend, no one can afford to fall asleep at the switch. Front-office types will pore over computer databases and financial spreadsheets, accounting for Wonderlic test results and each tenth of a second in each 40-yard dash. Fans and the media will scrutinize every pick.

In other words, draft day has come a long way.

“The change has been unbelievable,” said Rich McKay, president of the Atlanta Falcons. “No question it used to be a more laid-back atmosphere.”

In the early years, the NFL had no draft -- players simply went to the highest bidders. With rich teams hoarding talent, Philadelphia Eagles owner and future commissioner Bert Bell suggested a change.

The league held its first draft at the Ritz-Carlton Hotel in Philadelphia in 1936. The No. 1 pick, Heisman Trophy winner Jay Berwanger, decided that pro football did not pay enough and never played a down. Riley Smith, taken second by the Boston Redskins, became the first drafted player in the NFL.

Scouting could be haphazard in those days. In 1946, the Washington Redskins made UCLA back Cal Rossi their first pick, unaware that he was a junior.

They selected Rossi again in 1947 but had neglected to check with him -- he had no intentions of playing pro ball.

Teams needed to get more serious in the 1950s and ‘60s as the Canadian Football League, and then the upstart American Football League, began cherry-picking talent.

The NFL scheduled early drafts in November and December to get a jump on the competition. Later, according to the Pro Football Hall of Fame, teams gathered for secret drafts and “kidnapped” college prospects, hiding them in hotel rooms until they were selected.

Still, draft day remained informal. Gil Brandt, the longtime Dallas Cowboys executive who now writes for NFL.com, recalls the teams sitting around tables in a ballroom in 1961. Red Hickey, the San Francisco 49ers coach, walked over to Baltimore Colts Coach Weeb Ewbank and said: “I’ve got two pretty good tight ends, Dee Mackey and Monty Stickles. I’ll give you either one of them for a draft choice.”

“About five minutes later,” Brandt said, “Weeb came back and said, ‘OK, we’ll take Dee Mackey.’ ”

When John McKay left USC to coach Tampa Bay in the mid-1970s, he sent his son Rich who was attending Princeton, to man the draft table in New York.

“You’d sit with the phone to your ear for hours,” the younger McKay said. “There was no television, so you had to really communicate everything that was going on whether it was a rumor that you heard or whatever.”

Scouting grew more sophisticated over time, if only gradually. Into the ‘60s, teams did not keep large personnel departments with a staff that crisscrossed the nation. The job of evaluating talent fell to assistant coaches.

Bruce Allen, general manager of the Tampa Bay Buccaneers, says that his father, Hall of Fame coach George Allen, used to combine scouting with family vacations.

“Car trips,” Bruce Allen said. “We’d go along with him from Illinois to Florida and back, with stops all along the way.”

Two changes to pro football laid the groundwork for the modern draft.

First came free agency. With veteran players jumping ship, finding fresh talent became essential. Teams employed scouting coordinators with a dozen or more scouts on the road year-round.

“We can all be thankful to Paul Brown and what he brought to pro football,” former Green Bay Packers general manager Ron Wolf said of the seminal coach. “He brought scouting and full-time jobs.”

Then salaries began to skyrocket. With second- and third-round picks commanding big money, teams could no longer wing it.

“The pressure comes from how much money is spent on these guys,” said Kirwan, the former scout and New York Jets executive who is now a co-host on NFL Sirius Radio. “The public scrutiny starts . . . and if you mess up, you’re going to get fired.”

Teams spend from $2 million to $6 million a year on preparing for draft day, according to various estimates. Scouting services such as BLESTO provide statistics for every player in the country.

“Back in the old era, you prided yourself on being able to find a sleeper,” Allen said. “Between the technology and staffing you have now, there are very few sleepers or unknown prospects.”

No more family scouting trips. No more snoozing in the late rounds. But Kirwan suggested that if fans look closely enough, they might still catch a glimpse of the good old draft.

In 1999, his son played at Pennsylvania with a running back named Jim Finn. As the draft wound toward a conclusion that year, no one showing interest in Finn, Kirwan started calling teams, telling them, “You really should look at this guy.”

The Chicago Bears selected Finn with the final pick, making him “Mr. Irrelevant.”

“Here’s the funny part,” Kirwan said. “He played in the NFL for nine years.”

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david.wharton@latimes.com

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Draft history

How the pro football draft has changed over the years:

* Roots: Hall of Famer Bert Bell, the Philadelphia Eagles owner and future NFL commissioner, spearheaded the idea of a player draft in the 1930s. On May 19, 1935, the league adopted a plan for a college player draft. The plan called for teams to select players in inverse order of their finish the previous season. The first draft had nine rounds and was increased to 10 in 1937. It was expanded to 20 rounds in 1939. Adding a twist to the procedure in 1938 and 1939, only the five teams that finished lowest in the previous season were permitted to make selections in the second and fourth rounds.

* 1940s: In 1945 the rules allowed the five teams with the best records to draft alone in the final rounds, giving each team the chance to pick 30 players. In 1947, the NFL instituted a bonus selection whereby one team would receive the first pick. This bonus pick, which continued through 1958, was selected by lottery and each team was eligible for the pick only once.

* 1950s: The bonus pick was abandoned after the 1958 draft. By that time, each team had been awarded the first pick and teams resumed picking in reverse order of league standing. With the Canadian Football League attempting to gain popularity by signing college stars from the U.S., the NFL held early drafts from 1956 to 1959. The first four rounds of the drafts were held in late November or early December and Rounds 5 through 30 were held in January.

* 1960s: The draft became the battleground for a war between the National Football League and American Football League. Rounds were reduced to 20 in 1960, and the same year the NFL held a secret early draft to beat the AFL in signing players. The rival leagues held separate drafts through 1966 before holding joint drafts from 1967 to 1969 (reduced to 17 rounds).

* 1970s: In 1977 the draft was reduced from 17 rounds to 12.

* 1990s: The number of rounds was reduced to eight in 1993 and then to the current seven rounds in 1994.

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Sources: profootballhof.com; NFL.com