The common draft was the selection of college football players in a combined draft from 1967 to 1969 by the

American Football League The American Football League (AFL) was a major professional American football league that operated for ten seasons from 1960 until 1970, AFL–NFL merger, when it merged with the older National Football League (NFL), and became the American Foot ...

(AFL) and the

National Football League The National Football League (NFL) is a Professional gridiron football, professional American football league in the United States. Composed of 32 teams, it is divided equally between the American Football Conference (AFC) and the National ...

(NFL). This took place after the AFL-NFL merger agreement in 1966. From 1960 to 1966, the AFL and

NFL draft The NFL draft, officially known as the Annual Player Selection Meeting, is an annual event which serves as the most common source of player recruitment in the National Football League. Each team is given a position in the drafting order in reve ...

s were separate and each league competed for players, a major factor in their merger. During the three years of the common draft, teams from both leagues were combined in a single ranking to determine the order of the draft. The team with the worst record in either league the previous year picked first, the next-worst team second, and so on, with the exception that the loser of the previous year's World Championship Game picked second to last, and the reigning world champion picked last. As is the case today, any team's draft order could be affected by trades. When the two leagues formally merged for the 1970 season, the "common draft" became the modern NFL draft.

References

* ''The Making of the Super Bowl : The Inside Story of the World's Greatest Sporting Event'' by Don Weiss, p. 24

External links

Discussion of common draft on official Browns' pageCNNSI page on AFL, merger, and common draftPittsburgh Post Gazette article referencing common draft
NFL draft American Football League draft {{Americanfootball-draft-stub