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The NFL Draft Days of yesteryear were a little bit different.
There were no live television broadcasts. The picks weren t instantly evaluated. No, when Jim Richards was chosen by the Jets in 1968, the news came by way of a hallway telephone in his Virginia Tech dormitory. I came back from class, and a guy on the hall telephone said, Hey Jim, you ve got a call here. Some guy named Ewbanks. I said, Oh, let me take that call, Richards laughed. When I picked up the phone to talk to Weeb, he said, Hey Jim, we ve drafted you and want you to come play with us. We talked about the bonus and arrangements to get me up there to New York. It was a complete surprise, a pleasant surprise.
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The start of 1964 brought big changes to the Jets and the AFL as a whole. The Jets were moving into a new stadium, and the AFL was getting a new TV deal brokered by Sonny Werblin. Remember that Sonny was still involved with MCA when he first bought the Jets. It was MCA along with Harry Wismer who signed the original deal with ABC back in 1960. That deal was essentially a numerous amount of one year deals.
NBC was looking to make a huge splash by cutting into CBS’s near monopoly on football coverage. Sonny of course new all the people who crafted the original deal with ABC including Jay Michaels (the father of announcer Al Michaels). If NBC wanted in they would have to pay and pay big. So Sonny brokered a deal with NBC that was to begin in 1965 and pay the league $36 million over the next 5 years. That was a four fold increase in the ABC deal, a huge jump in just 5 years time.