330 Players Were Selected in 1944, 1945 NFL Drafts

Published on November 12th, 2022 1:44 pm EST
Written By: Dave Manuel


In this day and age, some people think that the NFL Draft lasts too long.

In 2022, 262 players were taken over the course of 7 rounds.

The fact is, in the mid 1940s, the NFL Draft used to last a total of 32 rounds.

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In the 1944 and 1945 NFL Drafts, each of the league's 11 teams made a total of 30 draft picks.

This resulted in a total of 330 picks over the course of 32 rounds.

The teams would converge at the Commodore Hotel in New York City to make their picks.

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In this day and age, teams spend many millions of dollars per year on their scouting departments.

There is practically no rock that a NFL scouting department won't turn over to try and find talent.

It wasn't like that in 1944 and 1945, and the drafts bore an amazingly small amount of fruit.

By the time that the later rounds of the drafts came, teams were largely just guessing and hoping for the best.

The drafts back then were long slogs without any fanfare - just a bunch of teams sitting in a room, making pick after pick.

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As more teams entered the NFL, the league started to cut back on the number of rounds.

The drafts would go from 30 rounds to 25 rounds to 20 rounds to 17 rounds to its current level of 7 rounds.

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The 1976 NFL Draft holds the record for most ever players selected in a single draft, at 487.

Over the course of 17 rounds, the teams would select a total of 487 different players, which resulted in some pretty outlandish picks by the end of the draft.

Enough was enough for the league after the 1976 Draft, as they would cut it down to 12 rounds in 1977.