Thanks to those big choices, the early 1980s brought many smaller alterations to the scenery behind the action. Some were necessary upgrades, such as replacing overhead projectors with digital monitors to display the names of chosen players. Others aimed to add drama, like the scoreboard-sized clock that counted down the seconds remaining before each pick. But the NFL’s most memorable addition from this transformative era was dialed up for maybe the least serious reason of all.
“We were looking for something that added a little flavor to those handheld, low-level camera shots of [team officials] on the phone, where the only identification they had was a sign above each table,” Steeg said. “It was so much better when the phone they were holding was a helmet phone.”
Debuting leaguewide during the 1983 draft, these team-branded, regulation-sized, facemask-and-all helmets — complete with a corded Princess telephone embedded in the skull — quickly turned into familiar fixtures. They played a supporting role in a frequent sight at the annual event: a stern-faced NFL team official sitting at a ballroom table, neck cocked and ear pressed to the landline’s receiver, maintaining a constant line of communication with the rest of his front office.
The helmet phones are a far cry — a long-distance call, even — from the marketing pomp that surrounds the NFL’s modern draft festivities, which more than 54 million people watched on television and another 312,000 attended last year. Beer vendors host pop-up bars. Orthodontic companies sponsor photo booths. In 2016, a Skittles-themed replica football locker room featured a life-size “hot tub” full of hard-coated candies that fans in Chicago were encouraged to climb inside (fully clothed, presumably) to pose for pictures.
But while they may seem quaint in comparison the helmet phones helped shape league history in greater ways than their playful nature suggests.
“I don’t want to say the draft was sleepy, because it was still important to the teams’ future, but it was certainly quieter in terms of public awareness,” said Gene Goldberg, former special projects manager for NFL Properties, the league’s licensing division. “But this gave a little pizazz to the draft in its own way. It made perfect sense, because the draft was all about the phones.”
GIVEN THE RELATIVE LACK of on-site reports from its nascent years, it is hard to say for sure whether the NFL draft, which began in 1936, has always been about the phones. But landlines were rooted into the landscape by 1962, when the Baltimore Sun’s Paul Menton devoted part of a dispatch from the Chicago Sheraton to describing the event’s distinct soundtrack.
“On the main floor the subdued ringing of telephones went on all day and most of the night,” Menton wrote. “There was hardly a table where at least one person didn’t have the receiver to his ear.” Two years later, a black-and-white Associated Press photo captured a similar scene: a ballroom that resembled a telemarketing center, with rotary phones perched atop each team’s table and cable wires strung from the ceiling like cobwebs.
The technological mise-en-scène stayed just as staid for almost the next two decades — until NFL commissioner Pete Rozelle and ESPN head Chet Simmons collaborated to put the 1980 draft on national airwaves. “Most [team officials] would just stay…
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