Cut in July: The NFL's Shortest First-Round Careers Ever
Published on July 19th, 2026 10:00 am ESTWritten By: Dave Manuel
Have first-round NFL draft picks ever been cut in training camp? Exactly one modern case exists: Dimitrius Underwood, the 29th pick of 1999, who signed a five-year, $5.3 million contract with the Vikings on August 1, practiced once on August 2, left camp without a word, and was waived on August 13 - a story later reframed by his bipolar-disorder diagnosis, and one he answered by making the Cowboys and playing 19 NFL games. Around that lone case sits the genre: Jay Berwanger, the first pick of the first draft, who never played a down after George Halas refused his price; the 1941 draft's top two picks, Tom Harmon and John Kimbrough, who both skipped the NFL and debuted for the same rival-league team in the same game; Denver trading first-round bust Ted Gregory for first-round bust Shawn Knight during 1988 camp rather than cut either; Washington stashing Andre Johnson for a snapless season in 1996; and the modern wage-scale economics - four guaranteed years and dead-money math - that have sealed the category at one member. The complete file, mechanisms labeled and myths corrected.Sports-King Feature
Gone Before September
Teams will trade them, stash them, bench them and pay them millions to stand still - almost anything before admitting the mistake out loud. The complete file on NFL first-round picks cut in training camp: the one modern case, the founding walkaways, the bust-for-bust trade, and the economics that make it nearly impossible today.
1999 · Round 1 · Pick 29DimitriusMinnesota VikingsUnderwood
Every July, NFL teams cut hundreds of players, and the procedure is so routine it has its own folklore - the staffer sent to fetch the doomed is called the Turk, and the sentence is always the same: coach wants to see you, bring your playbook. But there is one species of player the Turk almost never visits: the first-round pick in his first camp. The reasons are structural. A first-rounder arrives carrying a multimillion-dollar signing bonus that stays on the salary cap whether he stays or not, a fully guaranteed contract under the modern wage scale, and the reputations of the general manager, the scouting department and the head coach who chose him. Cutting him in his first summer means paying millions for nothing while publicly confessing the fastest evaluation failure in the sport. So teams do anything else: they stash, they redshirt, they trade, they wait. Which is what makes the short list below so remarkable. In nearly a century of drafting, the number of modern first-round picks outright released during their rookie training camp is exactly one - and the story of how that one happened, along with the walkaways, camp trades and quiet stashings that orbit it, is the story of how the NFL learned to price its own mistakes.
Modern Rookie-Camp Cuts1
His Practices Attended1
Bonus Forfeited~$1.75M
1941's Top 2 Picks, NFL Games0
1
The lone modern first-rounder cut in his rookie camp
The Pick29th overall, 1999
The Contract5 years, $5.3M, Aug 1
PracticesOne, on Aug 2
The ExitLeft without a word
WaivedAug 13
The CostForfeited ~$1.75M bonus
The signature: he is the entire modern category - drafted in April, signed on a Sunday, gone by Monday evening, waived before the first preseason game
The Vikings spent the 29th pick of the 1999 draft - their second first-rounder, after Daunte Culpepper at 11 - on Dimitrius Underwood, a 6-foot-6 defensive lineman from Michigan State whose stock had surged on pre-draft workouts despite an ankle injury that had cost him his entire senior season. On August 1 he signed a five-year, $5.3 million contract with a signing bonus of roughly $1.7 million. On August 2 he practiced once at the team's Mankato camp, then left the facility without telling anyone, surfacing days later in Philadelphia, where he explained that he was torn between playing football and serving his Christian faith. On August 13 the Vikings waived him, and Underwood gave up nearly all of the bonus - the only time in the modern era a first-round pick has been released during his rookie training camp. Michigan State officials suggested Minnesota had not done its homework; the fuller truth emerged over the following year, as Underwood - claimed by Miami for $395,000 after 23 teams passed, then lost to a shoulder injury and a suicide attempt that autumn - was diagnosed with bipolar disorder. That diagnosis reframes the whole file: the sport's lone rookie-camp release was less a football failure than a young man in crisis, drafted into the loudest possible spotlight. The coda deserves telling too. Underwood returned, made the Dallas Cowboys in 2000, and played 19 NFL games with four sacks across two seasons - every one of them for a team other than the one that will forever headline his story.
2
Pick No. 1 of Draft No. 1: zero NFL games
The Pick1st overall, 1936
The ResumeThe first Heisman winner
Drafted ByPhiladelphia
Rights Traded ToThe Bears
His Ask$25,000 over 2 years, no-cut
Halas SaidNo
The signature: the very first name ever called in an NFL draft never played a down in the league - and by his own account never regretted it
The genre is older than the draft's second year. With the first pick of the first draft in 1936, Philadelphia selected Jay Berwanger, the University of Chicago halfback who months earlier had won the first Heisman Trophy - then traded his rights to the Bears when the Eagles concluded they could not afford him. Berwanger, holding Olympic decathlon ambitions and a low opinion of pro football's wages, told George Halas his price: by his own later account to the New York Times, $25,000 across two seasons on a no-cut contract, several times what most players of the day earned. Halas countered lower; Berwanger walked into the foam-rubber business instead, and the first No. 1 pick in NFL history finished his career with zero professional games - though the company he founded was reportedly grossing $30 million a year by the time he sold it in 1992, which rather settles the question of who won the negotiation. The sport kept one physical souvenir of him anyway: Gerald Ford, who played against him for Michigan, carried a permanent scar under his left eye from attempting the tackle - the draft's original lesson, written on a future president, that the call is only an invitation.
3
Tom Harmon and John Kimbrough, together, elsewhere
Pick 1Tom Harmon, Bears
Pick 2John Kimbrough, Cardinals
NFL Games as RookiesZero
InsteadThe rival AFL
Same TeamNew York Americans
Same DebutOct 19, 1941
The signature: the top two picks of an entire NFL draft ended up in the other league, on the same roster, making their professional debuts in the same game
No draft class ever said no quite like 1941's. The Bears took Michigan's Tom Harmon - the reigning Heisman winner - first overall; the Chicago Cardinals took Texas A&M's John Kimbrough, the battering-ram fullback of the Aggies' 1939 national champions, second. Neither man played a down for the team that drafted him. Both instead surfaced with the New York Americans of the third American Football League, the era's rival circuit, and made their professional debuts in the same game, against the Columbus Bullies on October 19, 1941 - the first and second picks of the NFL draft, side by side in another league's backfield. The mechanics were the era's: contracts were small, leverage was real, and a college legend could simply decline. Kimbrough's football story ran through a war and beyond - he flew for the Army Air Forces, then starred for the Los Angeles Dons of the AAFC after the war and shared that league's rushing-touchdowns lead in 1946, building a fine professional career that contains exactly zero NFL games. A commonly repeated version of his story has the Giants drafting him and cutting him in camp over a salary dispute; the record is cleaner and stranger - the Cardinals called, and Jarrin' John simply never came.
4
Two teams return each other's mistakes
Denver's ProblemTed Gregory, 26th in 1988
The DiscoveryShorter than listed, bad knee
New Orleans' ProblemShawn Knight, 11th in 1987
The FixTrade them for each other
Gregory's NFL Career3 games
Knight's Career Stat Line1 fumble recovery
The signature: rather than cut a first-rounder in camp, Denver found the one team desperate enough to trade its own first-round regret straight across
The 1988 Broncos wrote the playbook for what teams do instead of cutting. Denver drafted Syracuse nose tackle Ted Gregory 26th overall, and by training camp the buyer's remorse was total - the staff found him shorter than his listed height and hobbled by a serious knee, a first-round pick who plainly was not going to play. But cutting him meant eating the pick whole. So Denver located the one franchise in identical pain: New Orleans, still carrying Shawn Knight, the 11th overall pick of 1987 who had already disappointed for a season. The teams traded their regrets straight across during camp - first-round bust for first-round bust, no cash refunds - and the football gods graded both sides accordingly. Gregory played three NFL games, all for the Saints, before the knee finished him. Knight lasted 31 games across three teams with one start, and his complete official career statistics consist of a single fumble recovery, a line that has earned him a permanent place in draft-bust historiography. The trade accomplished exactly what it was designed to: neither front office ever had to stand at a podium and announce it had cut a first-round pick in August.
5
The season-long non-cut
The Pick30th overall, 1996
The PositionOffensive tackle, Penn State
Camp ReportBadly out of shape
Games as a RookieZero
Snaps as a RookieZero
The ExitReleased after one year
The signature: rather than cut him in camp, Washington paid a first-round pick to spend an entire season invisible - the modern template in embryo
If Underwood shows what a rookie-camp cut looks like, Andre Johnson shows the maneuver teams invented to avoid one. Washington took the Penn State offensive tackle 30th overall in 1996, and camp delivered the verdict almost immediately: he arrived out of shape, was overwhelmed by professional speed, and by every account had no path to the field. A modern fan expects the next sentence to contain the word waived. Instead, Washington did the accounting: releasing him meant swallowing the financial hit at once and admitting the miss in August, so the club simply kept him - a first-round pick who spent his entire rookie season on the roster without playing a single snap, then was released the following offseason once the books and the news cycle could better absorb it. Johnson never appeared in an NFL game. His case is the missing link between the old walkaways and the modern era: proof that even before today's fully guaranteed rookie deals, the cheapest place to hide a first-round mistake was in plain sight, in uniform, on the bench - anywhere but the waiver wire in July.
6
The math that protects every first-rounder
Rookie Wage ScaleSince the 2011 CBA
First-Round Deals4 years, fully guaranteed
PlusA 5th-year team option
Cut Him Anyway?The cap hit stays
The AccountingDead money, accelerated
The ResultThe Turk skips his door
The signature: the modern CBA turned an embarrassment into an impossibility - cutting a rookie first-rounder now means paying him millions to leave
Underwood's case is now a quarter-century old, and the system has since been rebuilt to make a sequel almost unthinkable. Under the rookie wage scale introduced by the 2011 collective bargaining agreement, first-round picks sign four-year contracts that are, in practice, fully guaranteed, with a fifth-year team option layered on top. The money is paid largely up front as a signing bonus, and salary-cap accounting spreads that bonus across the life of the deal - but cutting the player collapses the whole remaining charge onto the current cap at once, the mechanism front offices call dead money. A team that released a first-rounder in his first camp would therefore pay him every guaranteed dollar, absorb the entire cap charge immediately, receive nothing, and stand in front of cameras explaining the fastest bust in league history - four punishments for one transaction. So the modern first-rounder in trouble gets redshirted, rehabbed, repositioned or quietly shopped, and the Isaiah Wilsons of the world (the 29th pick of 2020, whose Tennessee tenure lasted one game before a trade to Miami and a release within days, in his second offseason) implode on a delay rather than in July. The wage scale was designed to protect teams from rookie contracts. Its side effect was to make the rookie-camp cut functionally extinct - which is why the man from Mankato is likely to remain the category's only member.
The Full Docket
The file's members and its border cases, by mechanism. Gold rows are the featured cases; the red row is the category's entire modern membership.
| Year | Player | Pick, Team | Mechanism | The Story |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1999 | Dimitrius Underwood | 29th, Vikings | CUT IN ROOKIE CAMP | One practice, waived Aug 13 - the only modern case; later played 19 games for Dallas |
| 1936 | Jay Berwanger | 1st, Eagles (to Bears) | NEVER SIGNED | The first pick of the first draft; Halas would not meet his price; zero NFL games |
| 1941 | Tom Harmon | 1st, Bears | NEVER SIGNED | Heisman winner chose the rival AFL; debuted for the NY Americans Oct 19, 1941 |
| 1941 | John Kimbrough | 2nd, Cardinals | NEVER SIGNED | Same team, same debut game as Harmon; later an AAFC star; zero NFL games |
| 1988 | Ted Gregory | 26th, Broncos | TRADED IN CAMP | Bad knee, shorter than listed; swapped for Shawn Knight; 3 NFL games |
| 1987 | Shawn Knight | 11th, Saints | TRADED IN 2ND CAMP | The other half of the swap; 31 games, one start, one fumble recovery |
| 1996 | Andre Johnson | 30th, Washington | STASHED, THEN CUT | Full rookie season on the roster, zero snaps, released the next offseason |
| 1959 | Randy Duncan | 1st, Packers | NEVER SIGNED | The No. 1 overall pick chose the CFL's British Columbia Lions instead |
| 1986 | Bo Jackson | 1st, Buccaneers | REFUSED, RE-DRAFTED | Chose baseball over Tampa Bay; re-entered the 1987 draft and starred for the Raiders |
| 1987 | Kelly Stouffer | 6th, Cardinals | HELD OUT, TRADED | Never signed, sat out the season, dealt to Seattle the following year |
| 1983 | John Elway | 1st, Colts | FORCED A TRADE | The threat was baseball; the result was Denver - the walkaway's polished modern descendant |
| 2020 | Isaiah Wilson | 29th, Titans | IMPLODED ON DELAY | One game as a rookie; traded to Miami in his second offseason and cut within days |
The Arithmetic
Three measurements of the rarity: the clock on the only modern case, the careers the category produced, and the money that decided the walkaways.
The Underwood clock
Signed on a Sunday, gone Monday, waived within a fortnight. The contract was scheduled to run into 2004; his tenure as a Viking, measured in practices, was one.
Career NFL games, the whole file
Kimbrough's zero is the most misleading bar - he had a genuinely good professional career, every snap of it in the AFL and AAFC, including a share of the 1946 rushing-touchdowns lead. Berwanger's zero is total and, by his telling, entirely comfortable.
The money that decided it
Two walkaways, sixty-three years apart, priced in their own eras: Berwanger's ask was a fortune for 1936 and Halas refused it; Underwood forfeited a bonus seventy times larger and signed elsewhere for a league-minimum-grade salary within a fortnight. The category has never been about the money making sense.
The Record Book
The margins of the file: the man with the sport's strangest stat line, the era that made walking away normal, the humane reading of the headline case, and what would have to break for it to happen again.
The One-Line CareerShawn Knight deserves his own plaque in this museum. An 11th overall pick, he appeared in 31 NFL games across New Orleans, Denver and Phoenix, started once, and his complete official career statistics read, in full: one fumble recovery. No tackles credited in the official ledger, no sacks, no yards - one loose ball, gathered. It is the perfect statistical epitaph for the trade that acquired him, in which two teams exchanged first-round mistakes specifically so that neither would have to cut one, and the transaction's total on-field product across both players was three games and that single recovery.
When Walking Away Was NormalThe pre-war NFL had no leverage over its draftees because it had no money. Rosters paid in the low hundreds per game, rival leagues kept forming, and a college hero often earned more in business, coaching or Hollywood - Tom Harmon was a broadcasting and film name before he was a pro football player. That is why the era's docket rows read NEVER SIGNED rather than CUT: the draft was an option, not a destiny, and the top of the 1941 class treating the NFL as the inferior offer was noted, but not shocking. The astonishment only becomes possible once the money does - which is the quiet argument of this entire file.
The Humane ReadingThe headline case deserves to be read with its ending attached. Dimitrius Underwood was a 22-year-old dealing with what was later diagnosed as bipolar disorder, drafted into the most scrutinized job in American sports, and the year that followed his walkout included a suicide attempt and hospitalization. He also came back: he made an NFL roster in Dallas the next season, played two years, and recorded four sacks. The football world filed him under bust; the fuller file reads differently - a player in crisis whom the sport eventually gave a second chapter, and the reason this article treats the only modern rookie-camp cut as something other than a punchline.
What Would Have To BreakCould it happen again? The honest answer is: only through catastrophe, not football. The wage scale means a rookie first-rounder's performance in camp is economically irrelevant - he could be the worst player on the field and the math still says keep him, redshirt him, trade him at a discount next spring. The scenarios that could genuinely produce a second Underwood are the non-football ones: a legal bombshell, a failed physical hiding something profound, a player who simply refuses to play. Absent that, the category stays closed at one member - and every summer the Turk walks past the first-rounder's door, not out of mercy, but arithmetic.
Sports-King's Note
Now for the fine print. Definitions first: the file counts players selected in the first round of the NFL draft, and cut in rookie camp means outright released during or immediately around a player's first training camp - by that standard the modern membership is Underwood alone, and the surrounding cases are labeled by their actual mechanism (never signed, traded in camp, stashed, held out). Underwood's dates and figures follow the contemporaneous record: signed August 1, 1999 (five years, $5.3 million, bonus reported around $1.7 million), one practice August 2, waived August 13, claimed by Miami August 16 after 23 teams passed, at $395,000; the forfeited-bonus figure circulates as both $1.7 million and $1.75 million and we print the range's shape rather than false precision. His bipolar diagnosis and the suicide attempt that preceded it are part of the public record and are presented factually; this file declines the bust framing on those grounds, and the one Underwood quote used is from Associated Press reporting at the time. Berwanger's $25,000 ask is his own account, given to the New York Times decades later; other tellings put the numbers at $15,000 a year against a $13,500 counter, and we label his version as his. Kimbrough was drafted second overall by the Chicago Cardinals per Pro Football Reference - a widely repeated version of his story involving the Giants and a camp salary dispute does not match the draft record, and his October 19, 1941 debut alongside Harmon for the New York Americans is per the standard histories, as is his 1946 AAFC rushing-touchdowns title with Los Angeles. Gregory's and Knight's figures (26th and 11th overall; three games; 31 games, one start, one fumble recovery) follow the reference records, with Denver's height-and-knee discovery per the standard accounts. Andre Johnson's zero games are a matter of record; the exact date of his release is phrased as the following offseason. The wage-scale mechanics are described at the level of the CBA's structure without projecting specific current dollar figures.One Last Word
The draft sells certainty: thirty-two names a year, called in lights, guaranteed the benefit of every doubt money can buy. The training-camp cut is the sport's most brutal ordinary event, visited on hundreds of players every summer. This file lives at the intersection those two facts almost never share - and the fact that it has one modern member is not a story about talent evaluation. It is a story about what admitting a mistake costs, and who is ever made to pay it in public.
The hard numbers, for the road: one modern first-round pick has been cut during his rookie training camp - Dimitrius Underwood, 29th overall in 1999, one practice, waived twelve days after signing, roughly $1.75 million forfeited. Before the money, the category's ancestors simply declined to arrive: the first pick of the first draft never played a down, and 1941's top two selections debuted in another league, in the same game, for the same team. In between sit the evasions - a bust-for-bust camp trade whose combined return was three games and a fumble recovery, and a season-long stash that let a team cut its first-rounder without ever using the word. Since 2011, four fully guaranteed years and the mathematics of dead money have sealed the category shut. The Turk still knocks on doors every July. Arithmetic decides which ones.
