Michigan halfback Tom Harmon won the Heisman Trophy as a senior and was the No. 1 pick in the 1941 NFL draft. (AP Photo)
Even if the actual attendance number falls short of the 1 million visitors Washington Commanders owner Josh Harris and NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell envisioned at Monday’s Oval Office announcement, the NFL draft is guaranteed to attract more visitors when it returns to D.C. in the spring of 2027 than it did the only previous time it was held in the District. The local football fans should be in a better mood, too.
The last time Washington hosted the NFL’s premier offseason event was Dec. 10, 1940, at the Willard Hotel. The audience was limited to any hotel guests who happened to wander by the room where owners and coaches from the league’s 10 teams were meeting, as they took turns over 22 rounds selecting college seniors to bolster their rosters for the 1941 season.
Two days earlier, George Halas’s Chicago Bears had embarrassed Washington by a record-setting margin in the NFL championship game at D.C.’s Griffith Stadium. That stunning rout, not the draft, was the talk of the town.
“On every street corner, throughout the city’s café’s, restaurants and cocktail lounges, the subject of the Redskins’ 73-0 loss … monopolized conversation,” The Washington Post reported on the day the draft began.
The 1941 NFL draft in D.C. was unremarkable for the talent it produced — Gonzaga halfback Tony Canadeo, a ninth-round pick of the Green Bay Packers, was the only Hall of Famer among the 200 players selected — but the event did feature some controversy. The Bears, fresh off their first title since 1933, had three first-round picks, which led to the enactment of a rule designed to prevent such a situation in future years.
The NFL draft’s early years
At a league meeting in 1935, Philadelphia Eagles co-owner Bert Bell proposed a player draft system, with the order of selection determined by teams’s reverse order of finish in the previous season. Until that point, college players were free to sign wherever they pleased, and Bell, whose Eagles had posted losing records in each of their first three seasons, had become frustrated with seeing the best talent sign with the best teams year after year. The league’s winningest franchises, including the Bears and Green Bay Packers, approved of Bell’s idea because it would keep player salaries down.
The first NFL draft was held at the Ritz-Carlton Hotel in Philadelphia on Feb. 8, 1936. By virtue of their 2-9 finish in 1935, the Eagles had the first pick, which they used to select University of Chicago halfback and Heisman Trophy winner Jay Berwanger. Three days later, fearing that he couldn’t afford to pay Berwanger the $1,000 per game that the all-American reportedly planned to demand, Bell traded his rights to the Bears in exchange for a tackle. Berwanger, like the majority of the 81 players selected in the 1936 NFL draft, would never play pro football.
The second NFL draft was held on Dec. 12, 1936, at the Hotel Lincoln in New York City. The league’s Boston franchise, which would relocate to Washington two months later, selected TCU quarterback and future Hall of Famer Sammy Baugh with the sixth pick. Beginning the following year and continuing through 1942, the draft was held a few days before or after the NFL championship, and in the city that hosted the game. That’s how it came to be in Washington after the 1940 season.
Chicago’s stash of first-round picks
The day before the 1941 draft, the league’s owners and coaches gathered at the Willard Hotel with NFL president Carl Storck to discuss other matters, and to select an all-star squad to face the champion Bears in an exhibition. Washington owner George Preston Marshall and coach Ray Flaherty held a farewell luncheon for the team in the same building that morning.
“They were an unspeaking, downcast lot,” The Post wrote of the Washington players in attendance. “They couldn’t explain why, after winning the National Pro League’s Eastern Division race, they went so completely in pieces in a game for the world’s championship with a team they previously had defeated.”
Halas, the Bears’ owner and coach, arrived at the Willard Hotel with the ninth overall pick and two additional first-round selections, which he had acquired in trades with cellar-dwelling Philadelphia and Pittsburgh the previous year. This was news to the rest of the league.
“To complicate an already confused situation, the Chicago Bears yesterday claimed they were entitled to the first choices of the Philadelphia and Pittsburgh clubs because of preseason player deals,” The Post reported. “Owner Bert Bell of the Eagles said no, but the report persisted.”
Philadelphia was slated to pick first. Pittsburgh, which finished tied with the Chicago Cardinals for the second-worst regular season record in 1940, was awarded the third pick after losing a coin flip. Both selections now belonged to the Bears.
It was too late for the other owners to prevent the recently crowned champions from reaping the benefits of Halas’s shrewd moves in the D.C. draft, but they passed a new rule, which has since been removed, prohibiting a last-place team from trading its first- or second-round draft pick before he’s played at least one year with the team. The league also announced that the team that won the championship would pick last in future years. (Washington had the 10th and final pick of the first round in the 1941 draft after finishing with the best regular season record in 1940.)
“The World Champion Chicago Bears clamped a stranglehold on the National Professional Football League yesterday in the annual draft meeting at the Willard Hotel,” The Post’s Al Hailey reported. “Just as their power and deception on the field Sunday at Griffith Stadium left everyone asking what happened to the Redskins, their managerial strategy yesterday left the other nine National League club owners and coaches asking ‘what happened to us.’”
The Bears selected Michigan all-American halfback and Heisman Trophy winner Tom Harmon with the No. 1 pick. After the Cardinals took Texas A&M fullback John Kimbrough, the Bears drafted Stanford fullback Norm Standlee.
“As the draft meeting was adjourned last night by Storck, the groans and moans of coaches who hadn’t fared so well were at every hand,” Hailey wrote. “They had been ‘scooped’ by the greatest piece of strategy ever pulled in a national league draft meeting.”
“The Chicago Bears today were in a fair way to becoming the ‘New York Yankees’ of the pro football circuit,” George Kirksey wrote in the Chicago Tribune. “They hold the world’s professional football title, have corralled the pick of 1940′s crop of all-Americans and have had a league rule passed to curb their future attempts to corner the player mark. In all the history of the National football league no club has dominated the circuit as the Bears do today.”
Washington’s ‘nonentities’
The 1941 NFL draft began after noon and lasted “well past suppertime,” according to the Washington Daily News. By the end of it, 204 players had been selected. Only the five teams that finished in the bottom half of the standings drafted in rounds two and four, and the Bears forfeited their final four picks because league rules limited each team to 20 selections.
Halas’s first-round haul wasn’t as productive as the other owners had feared. Harmon never signed with the Bears. He starred in the movie “Harmon of Michigan” in 1941, served in World War II and played two seasons with the Los Angeles Rams upon his return. Standlee helped Chicago win a second consecutive title in 1941, but then went into the military and spent the rest of his playing career with the San Francisco 49ers.
The Daily News described Washington’s draft class as “largely nonentities,” as none of them had been named to the United Press’s first, second or third teams.
“It is amazing,” Marshall, the team’s owner, told the Daily News. “What I mean is, our unbelievable luck in getting everybody we wanted in the draft. I couldn’t believe my ears when the other teams passed ’em by.”
The most well-known of the bunch was Washington’s first pick, Forest Evashevski, who blocked for Harmon at Michigan and later co-starred in his movie debut.
Rather than sign with Washington, Evashevski pursued a career in coaching. After leading Iowa to a No. 2 national ranking and Rose Bowl title after the 1958 season, he interviewed to be the Packers’ head coach and general manager. Evashevski was offered the job, only to turn it down, before the Packers hired Vince Lombardi.
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