The Hippest NFL Draft of All Time (April 1980)

"It's Just a Room With Some People on the Phone"

Welcome to Throwbacks, a weekly-ish newsletter by Michael Weinreb about sports history, culture and politics.

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One morning in late April of 1980, a fledgling cable television network engaged in a vaguely comedic attempt to weave a compelling narrative out of what seemed like the barest of threads. “Picture the Academy Awards with Billy Sims instead of Dustin Hoffman,” wrote one sports columnist in Florida, although this was not really what the first televised NFL draft was like at all, unless you equated Johnny Carson presiding over the Oscars with a sportscaster named George Grande presiding over a low-budget affair held in a Sheraton ballroom and broadcast at 8:45 a.m. on a Tuesday, on a channel that a vast number of American households had no awareness of and could not yet access on their televisions even if they wanted to.

“It’s just a room with some people on the phone,” one producer for that network, ESPN, had told his boss, network president Chet Simmons, and yet Simmons didn’t …