The Longest First Round in NFL Draft History: What Happened in 2007
Published on April 18th, 2026 8:49 pm ESTWritten By: Dave Manuel
It was the first round that didn't seem to want to end.
The first round of the 2007 NFL Draft took an astonishingly long six hours and eight minutes.
In an average NFL Draft in this day and age, the first round usually clocks in at around 3 1/2 to 4 hours.
So what exactly happened to make the first round of the 2007 NFL Draft so unbelievably long?
Well, for starters, the first round of the 2007 NFL Draft had 32 picks, and each team was given a full 15 minutes to make their selection. These days, teams only get 10 minutes, which is a big part of why first rounds move a lot quicker now. Do the math - 32 picks times 15 minutes is 480 minutes, or a full eight hours, if every team uses every second of their time on the clock. So right off the bat, the clock itself made a marathon possible.
But the clock wasn't the only culprit.
Back in 2007, there was no rookie wage scale. That didn't come in until the 2011 CBA. Top picks were walking into massive guaranteed contracts, and while the actual money got hammered out in the weeks and months after the draft (Russell himself didn't sign with Oakland until September 12, 2007, after a holdout that cost him his entire training camp and the first game of the season), the pre-draft landscape was still more chaotic than it is today. Teams at the top of the board were having very real conversations with agents about whether a given player would even be willing to sign with them if drafted, which added a layer of uncertainty to every pick at the top that just doesn't exist anymore. Think of the Eli Manning situation in 2004 - that kind of drama was still very much a live possibility in 2007. Nothing that dramatic happened on draft night itself, but the uncertainty hanging over every decision at the top of the board was part of the overall mood of the night.
Speaking of JaMarcus Russell and the top of the draft...
Coming into the 2007 NFL Draft, Brady Quinn of Notre Dame was the consensus #1 pick in just about every early mock draft you'd come across. Then Russell and LSU faced Quinn and Notre Dame in the 2007 Sugar Bowl, and Russell put on an absolute clinic. From that point on, Russell leapfrogged Quinn in the mocks. But heading into draft night, nobody was really sure what Oakland was going to do. Al Davis was Al Davis, after all. The Raiders took Russell at #1, which now gets mentioned in pretty much every "biggest busts in NFL history" conversation you'll ever read, but at the time the decision was still genuinely up in the air right up until the moment the pick got handed in.
Which brings us to the biggest single storyline of the night: The Brady Quinn slide.
Quinn had been invited to New York expecting to be one of the first names called. Instead, he sat at his table in the green room and waited. And waited. And waited. Pick after pick went by, and the TV cameras kept cutting back to Quinn's increasingly uncomfortable face. Miami passed at #9. Minnesota grabbed Adrian Peterson at #7. The Jets moved around. By the time the 20th pick rolled around, Quinn had been sitting there for hours, and his slide had become the dominant storyline of the entire round.
He finally got drafted at #22 by the Cleveland Browns, who had to trade up with the Dallas Cowboys to do it.
And that right there is another reason the first round took so long.
Trades during the draft eat clock like nothing else. Every in-draft trade means the league has to process paperwork, both GMs have to get on the phone with the command center, ESPN has to sort out what just happened on the broadcast, and the draft board has to get updated in real time. The 2007 first round had plenty of trades. The Browns-Cowboys deal for Quinn. The Panthers-Jets swap that had Carolina sliding from #14 down to #25 in exchange for extra picks. The Jaguars-Broncos trade where Denver jumped from #21 up to #17. A handful of other smaller moves sprinkled throughout the round. Each one adds a few minutes, and a few minutes adds up real quick when you're already running on a 15-minute clock.
There's also the fact that this was Roger Goodell's first draft as commissioner. Goodell had only taken over from Paul Tagliabue in September of 2006, so by the end of April 2007 he was still pretty new on the job. Nothing obvious went sideways on the production side, but a first draft under a new commissioner is always going to come with a few small speed bumps that nobody really notices in the moment but add up over the course of a long night.
Put it all together - the 15-minute clock, the pre-rookie-wage-scale drama at the top of the board, the JaMarcus Russell vs. Brady Quinn uncertainty, the Quinn slide, the flurry of in-draft trades, and a new commissioner still finding his footing - and you've got yourself a first round that stretched well into the wee hours.
Now here's the kicker, and this is what really makes the story worth telling.
The 2007 NFL Draft class is now widely considered one of the greatest in the history of the sport. The first round alone produced Calvin Johnson (#2 to Detroit), Joe Thomas (#3 to Cleveland), Adrian Peterson (#7 to Minnesota), Patrick Willis (#11 to San Francisco), Marshawn Lynch (#12 to Buffalo) and Darrelle Revis (#14 to the New York Jets). That's four guaranteed Hall of Famers (Johnson, Thomas, Willis and Revis are all in), with Peterson a lock to join them the moment he's eligible and Lynch very much in the conversation. Bleacher Report famously called it the greatest draft class in 25 years back in 2012, and that take has only aged better every year since.
The first round of the 2007 NFL Draft took absolutely forever. But for most of the teams that picked that night, it turned out to be time very, very well spent.
The NFL eventually trimmed the first-round clock from 15 minutes down to 10, in part as a direct response to marathon nights like this one. Combine the shorter clock with the rookie wage scale killing off the contract brinkmanship, and you can say with a pretty high degree of confidence that the 2007 record for longest first round ever is never, ever getting broken.
