From Lottery to Legacy: The Burden of the Top NFL Selection

What does it take to be the.

Number one pick in the NFL draft?

It's the ultimate football lottery. A selection that can build a dynasty like the 70s Steelers with Terry Bradshaw or deliver a surgical legend like Peyton Manning.

But for every Bruce Smith who racks up a record 200 sacks, there's a cautionary tale that changed the franchise forever. Today, we're looking at the true titans of the top spot and the incredible pressure of being a face of a franchise and a league.

Welcome to the Pig Pen. You're just in time for Pigskin Dispatch's final finale of looking at the history of the NFL draft and the draft.

Pick number one, Ed Kleese, our guest, joins us once again.

We are down to the wire. Our countdown is at its end. Pick number one is up today because we are one day away from the NFL draft.

I am joined, as always, by our friend Ed Kleese. Ed, welcome back to the Pig Pen.

Hey, Darin, I see you're smiling today.

Is that because we've finally come to the end and the draft is we're at the draft, or are you smiling because you don't have to see me every day anymore?

All of the above, Ed. All of the above. Maybe the last one is maybe even the most important stuff.

Fair enough. Fair enough.

All right, so what. What can you tell me? What's your take on the history of the number one overall pick?

So I've got a lot to say, but I would say that the first thing that sticks out to me is that this is where history shift. Because, you know, if you have the number one pick, it generally means you stink.

Right?

You've had a terrible year the year before. There have been some exceptions with trades and whatnot, but for the most part, you're bad. You get the first pick.

And the difference between getting it right, getting it wrong, or getting it in between is ma. It's earth shattering, shaking, earth shifting, I should say. Earth shifting. And just like 20, 24 two years ago, it's just kind of an example.

And we don't know these answers yet, but, you know, the Bears take Caleb number one, the Commanders take JD5 2, and the Patriots take May 3rd. That will shape history for all three of those organizations.

Because what would happen if the Bears took May one and then, you know, Caleb went two to the command, you know, so these decisions that are made with the first pick pick have so much. So much of it rolls down to the rest of the draft, sets the tone for the draft, and we have really run the gamut of results throughout history.

And so I may. I want to. I want to figure out a way to try to. How do I figure this out? We're not going to.

You know, he never played for them because of baseball. Then he came to the Raiders. We all saw that he was going to be historically good, was in and out of the league. So a weird case. I omitted him.

So that left us with 39 years of number one picks that I felt we could judge. I came up with seven categories and I gave them each a number. So I came up with hall of Fame plus.

That means this guy's in the hall of Fame and he's at the top of the hall of Fame. Those players got a seven. If you just made the hall of Fame, you got a six. If you were near the hall of Fame, you got a 5.

If you were good, you got a 4. If you were average, you got a 3. If you were below average but not totally a bust, you got a two.

And then if you were a total bust, you got a one on the scale. So I added those all up. I had, you know, X amount of players in each category and my average score was at 3.8.

So just between average and good, what surprised me, Darren, was I only had five guys in my total bust category and I only had four in my hall of Fame plus category. So my, like, top five lists were actually kind of easy and there was just a big middle ground.

But wow, when I looked at it, of course, you know, I had the most players. Most players were in the good category, the four point category, 10 there. And then I had eight in the average and I had six in the near hall of Fame.

So the majority have wound up in that, like, middle.

A pretty. Pretty balanced spectrum you have there.

Yeah, it was pretty balanced. It didn't have the extremes I was expecting.

Okay. All right, well, let's. Let's hear the. I guess if this is the good, the bad, and the ugly. Let's hear the. The ugly.

I do. We'll do the ugly in just a second.

I did have two guys that I struggled with, Vinny Testaverde and Jeff George, because they were both busts for the team that took them. Okay, they were busts. They did terribly poorly for the teams that drafted him, but they actually wound up having pretty good careers.

So I wasn't sure how to chart that. So I just kind of put them in the average category.

They were the kings of the one and two year contracts. They're journeyman quarterbacks.

Right. I just couldn't quite figure that out, so I just kind of put them in the middle. But we did have some busts and we'll go through them here.

Including seven years to end his career with the Raiders after four disappointing years in Atlanta. But he only had seven starts in those seven seasons with the Raiders.

So he started a couple years for the Falcons and then became like back into the bench, special teams type role player and obviously nowhere near an impact that you want from the first pick in the draft.

Yeah. Didn't have the best of careers. Probably hope for a little bit more. So who'd you have after him?

19 Career sacks. He didn't have a whole lot of tackles either. So it wasn't like he was great against the run or anything. Just not a very good player.

Yeah. For the dominant career he had at Penn State in his senior year, it's. It's really shocking that he didn't have a better NFL career. Yep.

A little bit unfortunate in on his third carry of his first preseason game with the Bengals. I remember this. I remember at C Sports center against the Lions. I'm almost sure it was against Lions.

He tore his ACL at a time when that was a little more devastating than it is now, especially for a running back. And then the guy just could, when he came back, missed the whole story. Missed his whole rookie year.

His best season was 464 yards totally marred by injuries. We, maybe he would have been okay. We don't know. But, you know, it just never worked out for Kijana.

Yeah. Very unfortunate career he had in the NFL. All right, who's next?

He was taken by the Colts almost like the offensive version of Tony Mandrin. The defensive version of Tony Mandrits. Almost very similar. He had 19 career starts. That's not very many. Eight career sacks.

He had three years with the Colts, two with the Dolphins. He actually played one year with the Redskins. I barely remember that. He had a lot of injuries, too.

He did have one memorable highlight and I would encourage you and everybody else to go down the YouTube rabbit hole that I like to talk about. In his rookie year, they were playing the Dolphins. They had a four point.

The Colts had a four point lead and Marino had the ball at the eight yard line. Fourth and goal with 17 seconds left. So the game's on the line and it's a late afternoon Sunday game, so it's dark already.

Charlie Jones is on the call, so it'll give you a little bit of those old nostalgic feels.

And Marino drops back to pass and then jumps up and intercepts it and runs it 90 yards for a touchdown on the final play of the game to seal the game. It's a really cool, like something to go back and watch. So crazy. So he has this one nice highlight memory. He got injured a lot.

He was out of the league quickly.

If you kind of read between the lines, like, I don't really think unlike Kijana, who may have been because of injuries, it kind of sounds like his was just in addition to injuries, like he wasn't really working out very well.

Yeah, sometimes you're just not a good fit on the team and scheme you're in. So maybe that's the case for him. All right, so we have any honorable mention number one. Oh, I'm sorry, I thought we'd. Okay, sorry.

Yeah.

Who's our number one boss?

He had a 7 and 18 career record at 18 to 23. Touchdown, interception ratio.

The big thing about him was he was one of those, like, I'm not sure how you miss it because tons of conditioning issues, tons of weight issues in his career. Tons of. Does this guy want to be here? Does he care about football at all? Issues. Lane. Al Davis would later admit this.

Lane Kiffin was the coach at the time. Kiffin did not want Russell. He tried to talk Davis out of it. Davis didn't listen. He wanted to draft Calvin Johnson. Apparently, Kiffin did, but.

So it did not go well for Jamarcus. I have a little bit of a personal story, and this is.

This goes into like a kind of a little bit of a debate is I used to call in to talk radio here locally in Oklahoma City a lot back in that.

Around that, like, that surprises everybody.

Yeah, sure. Oh, you want to. This guy wants to listen to himself. Yapp. Right? He has an opinion about something. So I used to call this one show.

It was with Pat Jones, who's the old Oklahoma State head football coach. And it's been a Many, many years in the NFL, as well as an assistant with Jimmy Johnson, I believe, Dolphins, maybe even the Cowboys.

But Pat Jones has been around. And one day they were talking about jamarcus Russell, and he kept talking about how talented jamarcus Russell was and how he was blowing it.

And I said, no. I called in. I said, coach, you're wrong. Jamarcus Russell, that's the problem. He was not talented. He had a.

He was a big guy who had good size and had some arm talent. He could throw the ball very far. Talent as a quarterback goes so far beyond athleticism. Talent is innate, Right? It's something that these guys have.

Like, why is Joe Montana better than other guys? It wasn't because Montana was bigger or faster or, you know, had twitchier muscles. We don't know why he was better necessarily. You know what I mean?

We don't know. I'm sure. I know he worked hard and was smart, but a lot of guys work hard and are smart. Montana was talented. He had something that you can't define.

He was born with some sort of gift to play the position that none of us understand. Right? That's talent. Okay. Jamarcus Russell had none of it, like, zero.

And, like, he just was a guy that was big and strong and could throw the football a thousand yards, and people got enamored with it. I don't know if he could ever play quarterback, actually play quarterback.

So you get exposed very quickly in the NFL when all you are is an arm, you know what I mean? And that's. Yeah, it's cool that you can throw the ball from your knees 85 yards or whatever, but that doesn't often happen.

You Know in the course of an NFL game where that's going to be needed.

Right.

So I got in a big argument. They call. He called me an idiot since I didn't know what I was talking about. But I, I maintained that I was correct. Shocker.

Yeah.

I think he, his career maybe for different reasons almost had the same trajectory of maybe like Vince Williams or you know, Tim Tebow or I'm sorry, Vince Young. Vince Young or Tim Tebow, you know, who were, you know, maybe, maybe closer to Tebow because another guy didn't have the best alarm but could run.

But they're just that are NFL careers. They weren't great starting quarterbacks in the NFL. You know, they just didn't, it didn't translate from their college game up to there.

But we said that, you know, maybe the last 10 years, the college game and a pro game running sort of the same offenses with the RPOs that the NFL has adopted learned from the college game and, but back then, you know, they wanted pocket passers and jamarcus Russell definitely was not one of those.

No, well he, he wasn't a great athlete. He didn't, he didn't really run that much. Darren, he came to camp one time they said pushing 300 pounds.

So I mean like this is a guy that it's pretty clear he just didn't probably care very much either. So you know and see you gotta.

Put the work 21, 22 year old kids though too coming in so they're not the sometimes a maturity level and your support groups that you have back at home maybe aren't the strongest and don't help you through that stuff but do your homework.

Listen to your coaches, right?

Think you know your football history. It's time to put your pads on with the pigskin trivia drive. Choose your play. Go for a run short pass or risk it all with a long pass.

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Into some some happier talk here. What who do you.

Do you like top five? You know what I.

I think it's clear now all he ever needed was just a little bit of help. That's all he ever needed, just a little bit of help.

He's top 10 all time in yards and touchdowns in the history of the NFL now and he's still going strong.

He's still one of the top five ish quarterbacks in the league and as soon as he got to the rams and Sean McVay he went to another level after being excellent in Detroit and carrying that team as far as he possibly could. He's awesome. He has moved up the chart for me and I think he's one of the best number one picks ever.

Yeah, I don't think there's any debate about that. The good selection. Who do you have next?

I think he's already an easy hall of Famer, retires tomorrow, he's in the hall of Fame. He has two defensive player of the year awards already.

He could tie another guy we're going to talk about in a minute and J.J. watt as a three time or maybe he can become the first four time.

Possibly he's already in the top 20 of all time sacks and it's hard not to see him getting into the top five at least maybe he has an outside outside shot at number one. He needs about 75 more sacks. You know, if he plays, if he can get about 12, 13 a year for X number of years, maybe he'll get there.

But he, much like we talked about yesterday with Lawrence Taylor is not just a pass rusher. He's a complete and total game wrecker everywhere across the field. He's everywhere. He is a dominant force.

He is the most like LT that I've seen since lt. He's not lt. I'm not putting him quite there yet. Maybe if he does it like this for another five or six years we'll start talking about that.

And obviously he's a little bit buried because he's in the lousy organization where he's not getting the opportunity to play in big games. But I'm pretty sure if he did play in big games we'd notice him.

Yeah, it'll be interesting to see with the defensive coordinator change that's going on In Cleveland, you know, will they know remember how to use him the way that his coaches have the last few years. That's his by far his best years. Probably the last three or four seasons.

Yeah, I would say don't overthink it. Just say, miles, go get them. That's all you get. That should be the scheme. Miles, go. That's it.

All right, who do you have next?

He had one injured season and then his last year he didn't play a lot, but he basically played all the other, all the other seasons pretty much all the way through. Three time Defensive Player of the Year. Tied with J.J. watt for the most all time.

Eleven All Pro appearances, including five straight first team all pros. An absolute sack machine. He is the all time leader with 200. He ended his career with the Redskins four years.

He is not remembered there because the team wasn't great. But he was still good with the Redskins at least those first two years he was there. I think he had 12 sacks one year, but he was good.

He was a pretty good force. He's a, you know, I wouldn't say that Bruce Smith was quite the sideline to sideline guy.

He was a little bit more of that like kind of like pure D lineman edge guy. But in terms of that role, pretty much the best to ever do it.

Yeah, definitely.

He was very strong on setting the edge and maybe if you played in the air of the, the 3, 4, maybe he would have even been more successful, you know, having that, that burst that he had. But definitely strong against the run and played position well.

Yep, awesome player.

All right, so who do you have above him?

All of the pre snaps he was talking about a guy that. Okay, let's go back to this. Peyton Manning was insanely talented. He was not overly athletic. There is a difference.

Peyton Manning had that something that he knew how to play quarterback better than just about everybody else. He didn't have great.

He certainly wasn't quick and you know, he couldn't run at all and he didn't have a great arm really, you know Especially later in his career. He beat you with his brain. He, he won. He won the play before the ball was snapped. He knew where you were going to be.

He knew where his guys were going to be. It didn't matter if he could zing it in there because he's going to get. He knows when to go. He had it all figured out.

The Omaha stuff is funny, but it was also very much what made him him. So Peyton is the most cerebral quarterback of all time. I love the consistency with him. He didn't get hurt until the very end of his career there.

You know, he wasn't great at those, the very end there in Denver. That defense kind of carried him over the finish line.

Kind of made up though for some of the other Super Bowls he may have missed out on, you know, so, but, so he kind of got that extra one at the end, but he was amazing. That first year in Denver is one of the greatest seasons in the history of offenses in the football and quarterbacks.

What are you going to say about Peyton?

Yeah, definitely.

You know, we talked a little bit about him yesterday with the Ryan Leaf who was going to go number one, but definitely, you know, he didn't even have. I mean, he started right from day one and people sort of were a little bit worried about him.

I think he had like an interception, one of his first couple passes and didn't, didn't have a great start. But I think he learned from that. And you talked about the cerebral part of his game.

He know he learned from his mistakes and he usually didn't make it that same mistake again.

And he would figure out, you know, studying film study and you know, the hours he spent, the training he got from his very famous father and you know, the whole family of quarterbacks have come since. Yeah, just a tremendous player and one of the best quarterbacks all time in NFL history.

Absolutely. But it's not number one on our list.

All right, so who is number one?

If you look up the numbers and forget about eras and all of that kind of stuff, Elway, you know, is going to be more like top 15. A lot of these categories when it comes to touchdowns and yards and things like that.

You know, he's passed by a lot of the more modern era quarterbacks to put up some little bit bigger numbers. But I think we're all smart enough and intuitive Enough and watched enough football to know when a guy's got it. And Elway had it. He always had it.

He, he got those Broncos teams in the 80s as far as they could possibly go. They lost those Super Bowls because they didn't really belong on the same field with those NFC teams.

That was an era when the NFC completely dominated from like the early to mid-80s to the mid-90s. Complete dominance by the NFC. Those teams are so much better. There was very little that Elway could do once he got to those games.

That always kind of hung over him. People said, I can't win the big one. No one could have beaten the big one. Nobody, no quarterback was beating the 86 Giants or the 89, 49ers.

My God, that team was unbelievable. You know, that wasn't happening. And he also, also lost one to the Redskins, of course, and Joe Gibbs when his defense gave up 35 points in a quarter.

So, you know, there's just not a lot of answer for that. Um, he was fun. He was an, an athlete ahead of his time in terms of being able to run the ball, extend plays.

He was Captain Clutch, of course with the drive and there were so many more instances and then it was great. For me personally, I don't think he, he wouldn't have needed the two Super Bowls at the end for me to put him on number one on this list.

But that definitely cemented it, I think stamped it like, okay, he got the two rings and the first one they got because of him when he was still a great player and you know, the MVP and all that kind of stuff. So it was nice that he finally got the rings to validate that, that long career. Elway was awesome, Darren. One of.

He's always going to be near the top of my list of the all time great quarterbacks. Probably wouldn't have him quite with Brady and Mahomes in Montana, but he's probably four for me.

Yeah, I don't know. I mean, I like them, the two that you have been number one and number two.

And kind of ironic that they were both drafted by the Colts and later played for the Broncos. Right? Manning and away, of course.

Always the famous thing, never really played for the Colts, which was drafted by them much very similar to Peyton's brother Eli didn't want to play for the team he was drafted on either. But.

But you know, I might have Manning over Elway and because I think if you were going to go the top five quarterbacks of all time, I'm not sure Elway makes That top five. But Manning definitely is on there just by the success at the quarterback position.

And I know you're weighing it from looking at the 80s where, you know, Elway played quite a bit of his career, different era of, you know, passing the ball in the NFL. But I think Manning sort of transcends that because he was that good and at that accurate. And, you know, they both had two Super Bowls.

Manning did it with two different teams. You know, just besides the, the years that he set the. He said like the touchdown record, you know, that was just unbelievable.

That something that I don't believe that Elway ever did. So I think as a pure quarterback who didn't have any tools other than his brain and his arm because he wasn't going to hurt you with his legs.

We know that from the Manning brothers anyway. But I think I still might have Manning a notch ahead of Elway on that list.

I'll throw one counter back at you and then we'll talk about the prime of their careers. So Peyton had Edwin James, gold jacket. Marvin Harrison, gold jacket. Reggie Wayne, gonna be a gold jacket.

Dallas Clark, not a gold jacket, but one heck of a player. Go back to the 80s, you might not be able to name the other skill position players that Elway played with.

You know, we're talking Vance Johnson, you know, is that the best?

You know, like, gosh, the running backs, the name of Steve Sewell, you know, like, it's hard to even remember now, at the very end of his career there, he certainly had Terrell Davis and that was a major boost for LA and probably helped him finally get over the top. But for the majority of his career, he was not. He was just. He was, he was everything. He was the only guy.

Now he wound up with Rod Smith later, you know, too in the McCaffrey. So later in his career he did have some, some nice talent around him, Shannon Sharp. But for the meat of his career, he was a solo act.

Well, I, I could counter that too, a little bit. Sometimes it takes that quarterback to groom the.

His playmakers into being playmakers and lead them by not only passing or sharper routes or whatever, you know, whatever they're discussing. I think that's another area I think maybe Manning has a little bit of an edge on, because you hear stories all the time of him.

Like when he went to the Broncos, he, he developed the offense.

They.

He was the offensive coordinator, basically. They developed that offense off of what he had done in the past.

And I think that that's that part that much of the game and being that good of a quarterback at the position signal caller, the field general that, you know, running, putting his team into audibles to get him out of trouble. I think all of that sort of puts him in that category. Like I said, just a notch above where I would put Elway.

Fair. I'll. I'll leave it with this. I will give Manning the nod as the better SNL host and I will say that Elway was the better quarterback.

Okay, well, we can agree to disagree.

Okay.

But we had many other hall of Famers on here. You know, we told you the other night that, you know, the number three pick had 15. That was our record. Well, number one has 14 hall of Famers so far.

Back in the history first 45 years of the draft. The draft stat of the day. I'm sorry, the most popular position is a no brainer. It's quarterback by far. We still see that to this day.

That's the premier position as we're teams One of draft. But draft style of the day has the Indianapolis Colts and the LA Rams are tied for the most overall first picks in the NFL draft.

I did not see maybe perhaps the Cleveland Browns or the Cincinnati Bengals or Detroit Lions in there. But they, they were not, they were not even in top three.

So they've made, they've made a history of being the second worst team every.

Year Maybe they may be number two pick they have the most on. So. And Ed, you know, this has been a great journey here. I know you have a couple closing thoughts you want to say.

I do. I've got. This has been so fun, first of all.

And you know, we've done this for 32 days in a row and I know for both of us, while these podcasts were somewhere anywhere between about 15 and 25 minutes, something like that, it's been a lot more time of research and looking things up. For sure, it's been a lot of fun.

But I had a couple final bullet points that I've some observations that I've learned over this time that maybe I didn't really realize.

I've always been like a take the best player available kind of guy, but after looking at this, Darren, I am 100% about that now because what we see is even with the number one pick in the draft, our average was average, meaning there was just as many misses as hits. And then with the farther away you get from number one, the more that skews to the misses.

So there just aren't necessarily that many players available in any given year that are going to really help your team.

So if you get locked into a position or a need or you're drafting because it's a good fit with your coach or your GM or something like that, it's you're making a mistake because you need to make a pick of the I would ask yourself this, which player has the best chance to go to the hall of Fame? Take that player and don't worry about your coach or your GM because you want that player to outlive them. Right?

And so I think a lot of times these teams have pigeonholed themselves into drafting for positional needs or draft analysis or whatever, and they pass up on sort of the obvious in front of them. Or, you know, we're not going to take Luke Kuechley because we don't need a linebacker. Well, who doesn't need Luke Keighley, right?

Just take that guy. That. So that's my first observation. The second one is something we talked about. There's a big drop off after the early teens.

So we saw very little difference in the historical outcome of drafts from like the 14th pick through like the 32nd pick.

So if your team's trading down, I'd be very wary to trade down too far because you're going to get yourself into that no man's land where there's not much difference between, between 15 and 31. You know, that's. That's kind of what we're seeing. I'd say positional differences, too, stood out.

Meaning if you take a good quarterback 10th overall, it's probably a pretty good pick that's going to help your team. You take a Good Offensive Guard 10th overall, you probably made a mistake. That guard probably needs to be great in order to justify that position.

So that's something that. That was kind of consistent that I noticed. The same teams popped up a lot. The Browns and the jets, of course, kind of like in the misses.

We saw the Ravens and Steelers and Patriots a lot. And the good side makes perfect sense. Right.

One team that really stuck out to me was we saw the Dolphins have drafted horribly, and that kind of explains it. You know, you talk about teams that haven't had any success. Well, there you go.

And then missing on a top 10 quarterback is just deadly, because what happens is not only does he not help you, but you've invested, so you usually stick with it longer than you probably should. And that's just a deadly, deadly miss. And then I've got one more thing, Darren. It's my kind of, like, dirty little secret, I guess. Maybe.

And do you like movies that have, like, a twist at the end, like the Sixth Sense? Or, like, maybe for you, maybe. Maybe the Crying Game is more your speed. Do you like. Do you like.

Do you like movies that have, like, an unexpected ending?

I do enjoy those, I think. I don't know the many people that don't like those, because I've got.

I've got an unexpected ending, maybe for you. When it comes to me in the NFL draft, we've just spent 32 days talking about it every single day. Right. As a.

As a television show, I don't really like it. I think it's kind of. I think the draft is an overrated event. I think it's a lot of bluster. I think it's a lot of talk.

And I think what we've proven over these 32 days is that nobody knows what the hell they're talking about. No clue. We're just all blabbing. We're. We're. They're reading names on a state. The guys are walking over, they're hugging the commissioner.

Everybody's excited. Nobody has a damn clue what's going to happen with any of these guys. Everybody is talking out of their rear ends. No one knows. I don't know.

You don't know. Piper doesn't know. The GMs don't know. The coaches don't know.

It's one of the most covert operations in the world at this time. You know, people aren't squealing.

It's so much luck. It's so much luck. We don't know what we're talking about. And I actually kind of find the event itself a little boring and the analysis over the top.

And I find myself every year going, okay, here we go. You're going to tell me what this great steal that they got in the fifth round, taking this outside linebacker from Arkansas State.

I want to be like, timeout. You got no clue, man. We're probably going to hear that guy's name ever again. This is it.

I enjoy. I love flipping between the stations. And maybe you can't do it anymore because ESPN now runs NFL Network, so maybe we lose some of that.

But.

But I love doing that or going to my local station, listening to my local. What my local talking heads are saying about my team and things like that.

But I think the biggest part of this journey that I learned about is really how hard it is to get in the hall of Fame. You know, I was expecting. I never really looked at it in perspective.

I was expecting, like, the number one pick that there would be, you know, 50% of them being. But the highest we had was 15 people out of 90 drafts. So that's about, you know, 18 of the time.

The best draft has had only 18 of their people make it into the hall of Fame so far. And I don't think it's going to get much better than that over the years. You know, maybe we'll have a. Maybe one position will get a 20% or something.

But remember, we keep adding draft years on. This will be the 91st draft coming up.

It's hard to get in a Hall of Fame, and players have to be really good or have something really special or have a little bit of luck on their side with some. Some voters that are, you know, maybe twisting things we talked a little bit about. But it's still hard to get in Canton.

Yeah. And that. That stuck out, too. That's a really good point.

Was that, you know, it was really surprising for me to see the lack of true hits of, like, the, you know, I thought there'd be more kabooms or like, oh, man, this year we had eight guys in a row that, you know, almost went to the hall of Fame. It does not happen. It did not. And then we. I told you, we had some picks where I was shocked at how underwhelming the top five was.

You know, what I was gambling to find it. It's a tough deal. Nobody knows what they're talking about. Take the best player available, cross your fingers and hope you get it right.

Yep. Well, it has been fun, my friend. I appreciate the great idea you had.

We've put a lot of work into this and had a lot of fun and hopefully the viewers have enjoyed it, too. And you know, it's evergreen and people can listen to this all year long. Not just about the draft.

It's about some legendary players, more so than anything. So appreciate the time you put into it and the effort and the idea.

Well, I always appreciate the time, Darren. It was a lot of fun. And we'll come up with something new for the next thing. Maybe we'll do 32 days of schedule talk before it comes out. How's that?

You might have the wrong host. All right, all right.

That's all the football history we have today, folks. Join us back tomorrow for more of your football history.

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Special thanks to the talents of Mike.

And Gene Monroe, as well as Jason.

Neff for letting us use their music during our podcast.

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Of your favorite sport.

You can learn more@sportshistorynetwork.com.