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Why did Elway get away with refusing to be drafted to the Colts, on the premise that he didn’t want to play for the NFL’s worst team? Isn’t that what you do when you’re drafted #1, assuming no one trades up for the 1st pick?
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Why did the Colts and the NFL let him get away with it, thus setting a bad precedent? Was Elway just so much of a once in a generation QB that the NFL needed him more than Elway needed the NFL? Was Elway going to the Yankees really that much of a threat? He never talked about going to the USFL as far as I know, so that wasn’t really a factor.
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Given that Elway did end up getting what he wanted, how come it didn’t actually end up setting a bad precedent? Why did Peyton Manning happily just go to a just as woeful Colts team without a complaint? Why did pretty much all highly touted QBs after Elway just go to the team they were drafted to?
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As a player, Elways’ legacy is well deserved, but how come the Colts drama didn’t affect Elway’s legacy as a person? Was it that his father seemed to be pulling the strings back then so NFL fans don’t really hold it against John?
Evidently, his threat to play for the Yankees instead of be in the NFL was deemed plausible enough by the Colts that they’d rather have their first-round pick available to trade for another asset than have nothing at all.
Reported for forum change.
Heh. I didn’t think of that, because ever since I first saw a picture of Elway (1989 Super Bowl), I was struck by how much he looked like the QB from Revenge of the Nerds. 
I always thought he looked like the place kicker from Gus.
He *was *drafted by the Colts, but refused to sign. Eventually Baltimore gave in and traded his rights to Denver for Chris Hinton, Mark Herrmann, and Denver’s next year’s #1 pick.
No leverage. You can’t force someone to sign a contract and play for you.
Different set of people in charge there, even the there was different (Indy vs. Bawmer). It wasn’t a hopeless situation.
The league has a rookie pay scale in place now (slotted by draft position), among other things. And few other players have plausible leverage to force a trade - all they can do is sit out and forego the money for a year.
The Colts really did suck.
And because Elway is just such a nice guy, too. If he’d been an a-hole, the draft thing *would *be one of the reasons people would give for hating him. But nobody hates him.
You’re not drafted into the NFL the way you’re drafted into the army. You have the right to not go.
The pressure the NFL puts on rookies is that only one football team will offer you a contract. It’s virtually impossible for somebody to turn down a million dollar contract when the alternative is going out to look for a regular job. So people sign the contract.
But Elway had a plausible alternative; he was being offered a valuable contract with a baseball team as well. So he had leverage that most rookies don’t have.
I’m sure Elway could have gotten a spot in the USFL if he had wanted. But that league folded in three years. The Yankees were a more solid offer.
This sort of thing happens in other sports too. Eric Lindros refused to sign qith the Quebec Nordiques, so they traded him to Philadelphia for a package of players. Many, many baseball players have declined to sign after being drafted and played another year of amateur ball and were drafted again.
Elway’s “I’ll play baseball” threat has of course actually been exercised by other players, too. Dave Winfield was drafted into the NFL but chose a baseball career, which worked out pretty well.
Eli Manning basically did the same thing. He made it clear that he wasn’t going to sign with San Diego. I think he caught some flak at the time, but it went away. I wonder if the Chargers hadn’t gotten such a big return from the Giants (Rivers, Merriman) if bad feelings would have persisted.
But NFL players hold out all the time. And I don’t really hold it against them because they have the weakest players’ union by far. Seriously, non-guaranteed contracts? At least MLB and NBA teams honor their contracts, which yes, means that teams end up eating lots of money in bad decisions.
MLB players have done similar things to Elway/Manning, like JD Drew playing in the Independent League to avoid playing for the Phillies. His dispute was money related, though. Drew got a bad reception in Philly, but that also blew over pretty quickly.
Winfield didn’t play college football so I don’t think he was seriously considering the NFL. He was also drafted by the NBA and ABA, making him one of two athletes ever drafted by 4 professional sports leagues. The other was Mickey McCarty.
The ESPN 30 for 30 Elway To Marino has some interesting background on this. Elway’s agent had made it clear to the Colts before the draft that he wasn’t going to play for them and they needed to trade the pick. There was some talk (Dan Fouts to the Colts and Elway to San Diego?), but in the end the rest of the NFL was happy to see a poorly run Colts franchise screw themselves over. It’s a great documentary about that year’s draft, by the way. I highly recommend it.
In the documentary, an older and wiser Elway admits he was pretty much a spoiled brat coming out of college, and you can see some evidence of that. But yeah, as time went on he revealed himself as a pretty nice, likeable guy.
I think some aren’t remembering how he was viewed at the time. I know I thought he was a spoiled brat. He did not have a good reputation early in his career partially because of how he started it. But when you are talking about legacy the rest of his career eclipsed his holding out against the Colts by quite a bit. It’s basically a footnote. If he never won a Super Bowl maybe it would be more important. Same with Eli.
Here is what Wiki has to say about Elway’s potential baseball career:
So the threat of him actually jumping to baseball was very very real.
Elway was definitely a good enough baseball player to get a real shot in MLB. A 2nd round pick is HIGH. And it was the Yankees, who have bottomless pockets. He would have been given a lot of money and every opportunity to play for the Yankees. But he was a great QB. 1st overall pick great. And he was everything he was advertised and then some during his HOF career.
Actually, Bo Jackson did the same thing, but things worked out differently. He told Tampa Bay not to draft him number 1, and they did anyway. Jackson said “told you not to do that” and signed with the Royals. He never signed with the Bucs, and entered the following year’s draft and was famously taken by Al Davis in the 7th round.
The rest, well… Only Bo Know.
I remember that draft and Elway was the consensus number 1 QB. And I have always wondered if his refusal to sign in Baltimore eventually cost that city the Colts. I know it wasn’t directly causal, but if he plays in Baltimore, the Colts may have been better, and might have been able to parlay that into a new stadium.
I am pretty sure old Colts fans still hate Elway, but other than that, no one seems to be annoyed by him.
Kelly Stouffer was a quarterback drafted in the first round by the Cardinals in 1987. He really, really didn’t want to sign with the Cardinals and sat out the entire 1987 season. Finally, just before the 1988 draft, when their rights to Stauffer would have expired, the Cardinals traded him to the Seahawks for future picks.
Dave Logan of the Cleveland Browns (1970’s) played Basketball and Football for the U of Colorado and was drafted by the NBA and NFL. He was also drafted by MLB out of High School, so he makes three.
Coincidentally, he works for Elway now as the play-by-play man for the Denver Broncos. He also played with Elway in 1984 in his last NFL season.
Especially for somebody who was everyone figured (correctly) would ultimately end up playing football.
As a Charger fan, I should be over it… but mention of Eli’s name fills me with a white hot rage.
In fact… logically… I really love Rivers. Despite the fortune in Super Bowls (Rivers got Marty’d then Norv’d. We’ve had some knuckleheaded plays in the playoffs that were beyond Rivers control) I don’t think Eli is or ever was the better QB; so the whole thing theoretically, playerwise, worked out for us.
But everytime I picture him standing on the podium with the Charger jersey, looking like he wanted to vomit, I want to punch him right in the face. And everytime I see him on the field, that is what I see, and I just can’t help myself but want to see him get sacked over and over and over again.
It wasn’t the Colts were bad, it was that the franchise was nuclear disaster area. Elway didn’t like the head coach, Frank Kush, who apparently had a reputation as an overly harsh martinet. More importantly, though, the owner was a belligerent and unstable alcoholic. This article gives some idea:
Well, what was the alternative? Collude to have him blackballed?
The same reasons almost no one (outside of San Diego) cares about Eli doing it anymore: One, the rest of his career overshadowed the draft so it became just a footnote, and two, he didn’t actually do anything wrong. Elway, like every other man in America, wanted to have a say in where he was employed and whom he worked with, and, unlike most other pro football players, he was in a position to make that happen.