10 Players Drafted by NFL Teams Who Never Played a Down

The NFL holds its very first draft on February 8, 1936, at the Ritz-Carlton Hotel in Philadelphia. There are no scouting reports, no televised broadcasts, and no jerseys to hold up for the cameras. There is just a blackboard with 90 college seniors' names on it and nine team owners chomping cigars. The Philadelphia Eagles, with the worst record in the league, get the first pick. They take a 22-year-old halfback from the University of Chicago named Jay Berwanger, who two months earlier had become the first ever winner of the Heisman Trophy.

Here is the funny part. Nobody told Berwanger. He found out he had been drafted by reading about it in the newspaper. "I didn't even know the draft was going on," he said years later.

The Eagles immediately realized they could not afford him and traded his negotiating rights to the Chicago Bears for an offensive tackle named Art Buss. Bears owner George "Papa Bear" Halas met with Berwanger in person to talk contract. Berwanger asked for $25,000 across two years and a no-cut clause. Halas's final offer was $13,500. To put that in perspective, the average NFL salary at the time was about $2,000 a season. Halas's offer was generous by 1936 standards. Berwanger's ask was essentially "pay me like the most valuable player in the country" and Halas was not willing to go there.

"He asked me what I wanted," Berwanger told the New York Times years later. "I said $25,000 for two years and a no-cut contract. We shook hands, said goodbye, and he and I have been good friends ever since."

Berwanger walked. He briefly considered training for the 1936 Berlin Olympics in the decathlon, missed the team, and went to work as a foam rubber salesman in Chicago. During World War II he served as a Navy flight instructor and rose to lieutenant commander. After the war he founded Jay Berwanger, Inc., a company that made plastic and sponge-rubber strips for car doors and farm machinery. By the time he sold it in 1992, the company was grossing $30 million a year. He died of lung cancer in 2002 at the age of 88.

Yale was actually a football powerhouse in the 1930s, which is hilarious to think about now. Larry Kelley was the captain of the 1936 Yale Bulldogs, an All-American end with what teammates called "bear claws for hands," and the second man ever to win the Heisman Trophy. Yale would actually win back-to-back Heismans, with Kelley in 1936 and Clint Frank (we will get to him) in 1937.

The Detroit Lions drafted Kelley in December 1936 and offered him an $11,000 contract. The St. Louis Cardinals also offered him $5,000 to play professional baseball. Hollywood offered him a reported $15,000 to star in an autobiographical film called Kelley of Yale. Kelley said no to all of it.

Instead, he returned to his old prep school, the Peddie School in Hightstown, New Jersey, to teach history and coach sports. He spent decades there. Years after his death, the Peddie School football coach Andrew Clements told NPR that he still walks his current players past Kelley's Heisman trophy in the school's athletic complex. "Every once in a while, some kid will reach over and kind of touch the case," Clements said.

The end of Kelley's story is sad. In 1999, at age 84, he sold his Heisman Trophy at auction for $328,110. Six months later, he took his own life. He was 85.

One year after Larry Kelley, Yale had another Heisman winner: halfback Clint Frank, the only Yale player to win both the Heisman Trophy and the Maxwell Award in the same season. The runner-up in the 1937 Heisman vote was a kid out of Colorado named Byron "Whizzer" White. Whizzer White would go on to play three years in the NFL, then quit football, attend Yale Law School, become a Rhodes Scholar, and serve 31 years on the United States Supreme Court.

Frank, meanwhile, finished his economics degree at Yale, got drafted by the Detroit Lions in the 12th round of the 1938 NFL Draft, and decided no thanks. He went straight into the advertising industry in Chicago.

Then World War II happened. Frank enlisted in the Army Air Corps and served as a personal aide to General Jimmy Doolittle, the man who led the famous Doolittle Raid on Tokyo in 1942. Frank flew with bomber groups in Italy, Africa, and England and came out of the war as a Lieutenant Colonel.

After the war he went back to advertising and crushed it. In 1954 he founded his own agency, Clinton E. Frank Inc., based in Chicago. The agency worked on accounts including Reynolds Aluminum, Toyota, and United Airlines. He sold the company to Campbell-Ewald of Detroit in 1976, by which point he was the closest thing real life had to a Mad Men Don Draper. Frank died in Evanston, Illinois in 1992 at age 76. His family auctioned his Heisman Trophy through Heritage Auctions in 2018 for $312,000.

This is the toughest one on the list. Nile Kinnick, the 1939 Heisman Trophy winner from Iowa, was a 5-foot-8, 170-pound halfback who basically refused to leave the field. He played 402 consecutive minutes during his senior season before a separated shoulder forced him out. He passed for 638 yards, ran for 374, kicked extra points, intercepted eight passes, and was directly involved in 107 of Iowa's 130 points scored that year.

The Brooklyn Dodgers (yes, there used to be an NFL team called the Brooklyn Dodgers) drafted Kinnick in 1940 and offered him a reported $10,000 contract. He turned it down to attend the University of Iowa law school. He lasted one year. Then in the summer of 1941, with World War II already raging in Europe, Kinnick drove to Kansas City and enlisted in the Naval Air Corps Reserve. He reported for active duty on December 4, 1941. Three days later, the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor.

Read his Heisman acceptance speech sometime. It is one of the great pieces of American sports oratory.

On June 2, 1943, Kinnick was on a routine training flight from the aircraft carrier USS Lexington, stationed off the coast of Venezuela. His F4F Wildcat developed an oil leak. Rather than try to land back on the carrier and risk the lives of the people on deck, he attempted an emergency water landing about four miles from the ship. He died in the process. His body was never recovered, only an oil slick. He was five weeks shy of his 25th birthday.

In 1972, the University of Iowa renamed its stadium Kinnick Stadium. It is to this day the only college football stadium in the country named after a Heisman Trophy winner. An excerpt of his 1939 acceptance speech is played on the stadium scoreboard before every home game.

If you watched college football in the mid-1940s, you watched the Doc Blanchard and Glenn Davis show. The two of them, "Mr. Inside" and "Mr. Outside," were the backbone of the Army Cadets teams that went 27-0-1 across the 1944, 1945, and 1946 seasons. They are still the only backfield duo in college football history to have produced two Heisman winners, with Blanchard winning in 1945 and Davis winning in 1946. Notre Dame coach Edward McKeever, after watching his team lose 59-0 to Army in 1944, said: "I have just seen Superman in the flesh. He wears number 35 and goes by the name of Blanchard."

The Pittsburgh Steelers drafted Blanchard third overall in the 1946 NFL Draft. He wanted to go play. There was just one problem. He had a five-year service obligation to the United States Army that came with his West Point commission. He requested a furlough to play in the NFL while serving. The War Department turned him down flat.

So Blanchard did the only thing he could: he transitioned to the Air Force and became a fighter pilot. He flew combat missions in the Korean War. In 1959, while flying back to his base at RAF Wethersfield near London, an oil line in his F-100 Super Sabre ruptured and the plane caught fire. He had a parachute and a populated village beneath him. Rather than eject and let the burning jet crash into civilians, he piloted the smoking aircraft down himself, earning a commendation for bravery. Then in 1968 and 1969, in his mid-40s, he flew 113 combat missions over North Vietnam.

Blanchard retired from the Air Force in 1971 with the rank of Colonel. He died of pneumonia in 2009 at the age of 84. At the time of his death, he was the oldest living Heisman Trophy winner.

Princeton's Dick Kazmaier won the 1951 Heisman Trophy in the most lopsided vote anyone had ever seen at the time. He earned 506 first-place votes; the runner-up, Tennessee's Hank Lauricella, got 45. He was on the cover of Time magazine. He led Princeton to back-to-back undefeated seasons. He is, to this day, the last Ivy League player ever to win the Heisman.

The Chicago Bears took him in the 15th round of the 1952 NFL Draft. By that time Kazmaier had already made up his mind. He was going to Harvard Business School. After Harvard he served three years in the Navy as a lieutenant from 1955 to 1957. Then he founded Kazmaier Associates Inc. in Concord, Massachusetts, an investment and consulting firm focused on the sports marketing industry. He served as a Trustee of Princeton, on the board of directors of the Ladies Professional Golfers Association, and as chairman of the President's Council on Physical Fitness and Sports under President Reagan.

The hardest chapter of Kazmaier's life came in 1990, when his daughter Patty died at age 28 of a rare blood disease. Patty had been an All-Ivy member of the Princeton women's ice hockey team. In her memory, Kazmaier established the Patty Kazmaier Memorial Award, which is given annually to the top player in NCAA Division I women's ice hockey. The award is now considered the women's hockey equivalent of the Heisman.

Kazmaier died in 2013 at age 82.

Of every story in this article, this is the one that hurts the most. Ernie Davis was born in New Salem, Pennsylvania, raised by his grandparents in the coal-mining town of Uniontown outside Pittsburgh from the time he was 14 months old, and moved to Elmira, New York with his mother when he was 12. He was recruited to Syracuse partly because Jim Brown, the greatest running back to that point in football history, personally encouraged him to come. At Syracuse, Davis broke nearly all of Jim Brown's records. In 1961, he became the first Black athlete ever to win the Heisman Trophy.

The Washington Redskins selected Davis with the first overall pick of the 1962 NFL Draft. The Redskins owner at the time was George Preston Marshall, a notorious racist who had refused to integrate his team for years. Davis had no interest in playing for him. The Redskins traded his rights to the Cleveland Browns, where the plan was to pair him in the same backfield as Jim Brown himself. He signed a three-year, $200,000 contract, the most lucrative ever offered to an NFL rookie at the time.

Then, in the summer of 1962, while preparing for the College All-Star Game, Davis woke up with a swollen neck. Doctors initially suspected mumps or mononucleosis. The diagnosis came back as acute monocytic leukemia. Treatment options in 1962 were extremely limited. Davis went into remission once and was briefly cleared to practice with the Browns. But Cleveland head coach Paul Brown refused to play him in a regular season game, fearing for his health.

Ernie Davis died on May 18, 1963, at age 23. Over 10,000 people attended his funeral, including a personal message read on behalf of President John F. Kennedy. The Browns retired his number 45, even though he had only worn it in practice. His story was made into the 2008 film The Express: The Ernie Davis Story.

Of every name on this list, Eli Herring is the one I find the most interesting. He is also the easiest to overlook because he is not a Heisman winner. He was a 6'8", 330-pound offensive tackle at Brigham Young University in the early 1990s, second-team All-WAC, and projected to go somewhere in the first three rounds of the 1995 NFL Draft. USA Today ranked him as one of the top 30 prospects available.

Herring is a devout member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. To him, Sunday is the Sabbath. The Sabbath is for worship and family, not for work. The NFL plays its games on Sundays.

So Herring did something unprecedented in the modern NFL Draft. He sat down with BYU athletic director Val Hale and drafted a letter that was sent to all 30 NFL teams in the league. The letter informed the teams that Herring would not be playing professional football, that he would not work on the Sabbath, and that they should not waste a draft pick on him.

The Oakland Raiders drafted him anyway, in the sixth round.

Raiders senior assistant Bruce Allen flew personally from Oakland to Provo, Utah to meet with Herring face to face. He offered Herring a three-year contract worth $1.5 million. Herring said no. He took a job teaching math at Mountain View High School in Orem, Utah. His starting salary was $22,000 a year.

Herring met his wife Jennifer at church while at BYU and they married in 1992. They went on to have seven kids. As of his most recent interview with the BYU student newspaper, Herring was still teaching at Mountain View High School and serving as an assistant coach on the football team. His younger brother Isaac followed him to BYU and played offensive line for the Cougars from 1999 to 2002.

Eric Crouch ran the option offense for Nebraska better than anyone of his generation. As a senior in 2001, he rushed for 1,115 yards, threw for 1,510, and won the Heisman Trophy in the closest vote since 1985. He has a statue outside Memorial Stadium in Lincoln. He owns 32 different Nebraska school records.

The problem in the NFL was that Crouch did not look like an NFL quarterback. He was 6 feet flat, 195 pounds, and ran a run-heavy option offense that no NFL team in 2002 was running. The St. Louis Rams drafted him in the third round at pick 95 with the intention of converting him to wide receiver. Crouch was open to changing positions in theory but really wanted a shot at quarterback.

Then his body broke down. At the NFL Combine, he suffered a leg injury that required months of recovery. A hamstring strain limited his offseason. A thigh injury lingered into the preseason with the Rams. The week before the 2002 regular season opener, Crouch returned his $395,000 signing bonus and announced his retirement from football. He was 23 years old.

What followed was a long, strange professional football career that never quite happened. He signed with the Green Bay Packers as a quarterback and safety in 2003 but was released. He played NFL Europe in 2005 with the Hamburg Sea Devils as a safety. He played CFL with the Toronto Argonauts in 2006 and 2007 as a backup quarterback. He played one game for the Omaha Nighthawks of the United Football League in 2011 before tearing his meniscus. Through all of it, Crouch underwent eleven football-related surgeries. He never played a single down in an NFL regular-season game.

Today Crouch lives in Omaha with his wife Nicole and two kids. He runs Crouch Recreation, a company that designs and sells playground and recreation equipment. He coaches his son's youth football team. In 2020 he was inducted into the College Football Hall of Fame.

Myron Rolle was a top-rated high school recruit out of New Jersey. He was named the nation's number one high school prospect by ESPN. He had over 80 college scholarship offers. When he made his official visits, he asked to tour the medical schools attached to each university. Before he even committed to Florida State, he told head coach Bobby Bowden exactly how the relationship would go: he would turn pro after three years, win a Rhodes Scholarship, and then go to medical school.

He delivered on every single one of those promises.

Rolle finished his undergraduate degree at Florida State in two and a half years with a 3.75 GPA in exercise science. He was named a Rhodes Scholar in November 2008, with the announcement coming three hours before Florida State's game against Maryland (the NCAA allowed him to take a chartered plane from his interview in Birmingham, Alabama to College Park to make kickoff). He spent the 2009-10 academic year at Oxford earning a master's degree in medical anthropology. Then he entered the 2010 NFL Draft.

The Tennessee Titans drafted him in the sixth round at pick 207. Rolle spent two seasons on the Titans roster and a brief stint with the Pittsburgh Steelers, but he never appeared in a regular-season game. In 2013 he announced he was leaving the NFL to attend medical school.

What happened next is the kind of resume you read and double-check to make sure it is real. Florida State College of Medicine, graduated May 2017. Neurosurgery residency at Massachusetts General Hospital and Harvard Medical School. Pediatric neurosurgery fellowship at Johns Hopkins All Children's Hospital in St. Petersburg, Florida. Rolle is now a practicing pediatric neurosurgeon at Nemours Children's Hospital in Orlando. His memoir, The 2% Way: How a Philosophy of Small Improvements Took Me to Oxford, the NFL, and Neurosurgery, was published in 2022.

If you ever wondered what the pinnacle of "I had backup plans for my backup plans" looks like, it looks like Myron Rolle.