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The NFL draft. It's one of television's biggest non-competitive sporting events, with ratings that beat out NBA playoff games. The annual draft is when pro teams fill their rosters with fresh talent, selecting top college players from around the country and from around the world. Eligibility for the draft is simple. A player needs to be at least three years out of high school. Rules don't stipulate that you have to attend college during that time, but most that are drafted are college players. There are some exceptions where players can enter the draft a bit early, but those cases are rare. Every spring, all 32 NFL teams battle it out over the course of three days and seven rounds of selection to fill their teams with a new batch of young players. For the 2018 draft, over 16,000 college football players were draft eligible, but less than 2 percent of them actually made it to the NFL. 255 players were drafted from college and one player instead was playing professional rugby in Australia. But even if you do land one of those highly-coveted spots, not all draft recruits are considered equal when it comes to pay. There are sizeable gaps in pay when you compare first-round talent to seventh-round talent. A player drafted dead last can have a full four year contract worth less than a fraction of a first-round talent signing bonus alone. But even players all chosen the first round can face pretty big pay disparities in the range of millions of dollars. Before the NFL draft became a premier television event, the battle for new players was fought behind closed doors and hotel banquet halls. But in 1936, then-NFL league commissioner Bert Bell decided to formalize the process when he rolled out the NFL draft. To Bell, the draft was a way to even the playing field for teams that continue to have losing records. Similar to today, teams with the worst records would pick first and each round and eventually the teams with winning records, or that had won the NFL championship, would pick last. At that time, there were only nine teams and a total of 81 total draft picks. By 1959, the NFL's popularity was at its highest ever, raking in television ratings of over 45 million people for its championship game between the Baltimore Colts and the New York Giants. That attracted wealthy businessmen to want to get in on the NFL. But when they appealed to the NFL to let them start new teams or buy franchises, they were turned down. That had a lot to do with why the American Football League was founded by Lamar Hunt in that same year. On November 22nd, 1959, the AFL hosted its first ever draft. Unsurprisingly, there was a lot of overlap between the NFL and AFL picks, and the two leagues also poached talent from one another. That's a big reason why, in the 1960s, the NFL and AFL merged. The result...