The NFL draft has always been quite the spectacle. There have been movies made about it (2014’s “Draft Day,” starring Kevin Costner, is so bad it’s almost good) and the second the NFL season ends the media coverage of it is relentless. Especially in the age of social media and smartphones, anytime a prospect meets with anyone or does anything of note, you hear about it immediately.
But even 30 years ago, the draft was still an absolute whirlwind for the prospects. Take former Pittsburgh Steelers All-Pro LB Chad Brown for example. Brown was a prospect in the 1993 NFL Draft, and recently talked about his draft experience on the Greenie podcast.
“Your whole life is up in the air. Where am I going to go, what round am I going to go? I was projected as early as late first, I was projected second round. What teams are interested?” Brown remembered. “It was a week of uncertainty and a week of anxiety in some ways…It’s a roller-coaster ride.”
Brown had a bit of an up-and-down college career, which explained why he might have been so uncertain about his draft landing spot in 1993. As a senior, he suffered a myriad of injuries, including a broken band, back spasms, and a separated shoulder. Despite all of this, he managed to produce in a big way, being named a second-team All-American and making himself known to NFL brass.
Brown would ultimately be selected with the 44th overall pick by the Pittsburgh Steelers, adding another athletic piece to an already solid defense nicknamed “Blitzburgh”.
However, while hearing your name called on draft night is a dream come true for many, for Brown, it also served to set him up for a harsh reality check once mini-camp hit.
“After that, [you realize] ‘I gotta go do this. I gotta go play with these trained assassins,'” Brown recalled. “We had a physical offseason practice and then we had some conditioning at the end of that practice. And I thought ‘Maybe this is not for me. Maybe I’m just not built for this.’”
Brown put those self-doubts to rest pretty quickly in his rookie year. He played in all 16 games in 1993, starting in nine and helping lead the Steelers to a top-10 scoring defense. He was also named to the league’s All-Rookie team and was given the Steelers Rookie of the Year award.
Some, like Brown, are able to make the transition to the NFL seamlessly, but for many more, their names lost to time and only found on Football Reference, it’s far more difficult. So remember that over the next few days when you watch the draft. For many of these guys, hearing their name called will be the highlight of their professional football career.
