Forgotten picks to gas mask bongs: the strangest NFL draft moments

Teams spend years plotting their draft strategy. But once the clock starts ticking, things do not always go as planned.

The gas mask bong

It’s the ultimate “where were you” draft moment. Laremy Tunsil was slated to be a top-five pick in the 2016 Draft. Plenty of mocks had him going with the top overall pick to Tennessee before the Titans traded it away. But shortly before the draft kicked off, Tunsil’s social media accounts were hacked. They posted videos of Tunsil smoking through a gas mask bong and lobbying his college coaches for payments.

Fresh material was dropped as each pick rolled by. Teams scrambled to find information. Baltimore, in need of a tackle, passed on Tunsil with the sixth pick in favor of Ronnie Stanley. Stanley’s agent, Jimmy Sexton, started to frantically call teams to explain away the video. The slide lasted until the 14th pick, with the Dolphins picking the top tackle in the class.

“The optics were far from perfect, but we kept it in the context of a good kid who loves football and is a good person,” Dolphins GM Mike Tannenbaum said. “We just felt like it was too good an opportunity to pass up.”

Tunsil proved to live up to his pre-draft promise, becoming one of the top blindside protectors in the league, though he says the video robbed him of some recognition. His draft day descent cost him money, too, but he would made the bulk of his losses back when he signed three-year, $75m extension with the Texans in 2023 after he was dealt away from Miami.

The Vikings ‘pass’ on their pick

No franchise operated with more draft-day dysfunction than the early 2000s Vikings.

The draft has a fairly simplistic structure: the league assembles an order based on teams’ records the previous season; each team gets a certain amount of time to make their selection; the decision-makers decide who they’re selecting; the team fills out a card and hands it to the league office; the rest of the teams are notified and the draft shuffles along to the next pick.

Almost. Imagine spending months, mining the tape, measuring ankles and wingspans, talking to every person who has come within touching distance of every prospect, and then when you’re up on the clock, you miss your pick. That’s what happened to the Vikings in 2003. And it wasn’t just with any pick, it was the seventh overall selection.

Minnesota spent the early stages of the draft trying to engineer a trade down the board. As their turn approached, they finalized a deal with the Ravens. But the team was unable to get official signoff on the trade before their time on the clock expired. Because they hadn’t made a selection, the trade was void and their pick “passed” to the next team on the clock: the Jaguars.

“They passed!” Chris Berman yelled on ESPN’s broadcast. “What are they doing? The only thing I can think is they know who they’re taking and want to pay them as the 11th pick in the draft rather than the seventh. My God.”

Draft rules state that if a team passes on their pick, they can make their selection whenever they want. But Jacksonville rushed ahead to make their pick, selecting quarterback Byron Leftwich, the player Baltimore was targeting in a trade up. Carolina were next to race up to the podium before Minnesota could figure out what was happening, selecting left tackle Jordan Gross, the top player on Minnesota’s draft board.

“I’m pissed,” said Vikings coach Mike Tice in the aftermath. “There is no other way I can put it.”

The upshot: the Vikings fell from the seventh pick to the ninth pick without getting anything in return. But in the rush to make a selection, Minnesota grabbed defensive lineman Kevin Williams, a player who would go on to be one of the best interior linemen of his generation.

Minnesota’s passed pick was one of the most perplexing moments in draft annals. And they kind of, sort of did it twice. And they did it in back-to-back years.

The Vikings try to jump the queue

A year before the aborted trade with the Ravens, Minnesota made a similar snafu. Sitting on the seventh pick in 2002, Minnesota were targeting defensive tackle Ryan Sims. The Cowboys were on the clock with the sixth pick and were talking with the Chiefs about trading down. Like Minnesota, Kansas City were targeting Sims, and wanted to leapfrog the Vikings in the order. As the clock wound down on the Cowboys’ pick without a trade being finalized, Minnesota tried to seize an opportunity: they handed in a card for Sims with their pick before they were officially up on the clock.

The Cowboys and Chiefs were able to agree to trade terms and KC picked Sims, leaving the Vikings in the lurch. Minnesota had to withdraw their draft card and file a different name. They selected all-world left tackle prospect Bryant McKinnie out of Miami, but the two parties became mired in a contract dispute that wasn’t resolved until well into McKinnie’s rookie season.

The Saints trade an entire class for Ricky Williams

Oh for the time when running backs were deemed so valuable that teams would select them in the first round. Better yet, teams would trade up in the draft to grab a potential franchise rusher. The Saints took that logic to its extreme, dealing their entire draft class to select running back Ricky Williams fifth overall in 1999.

Most teams hoard draft picks like an oligarch stashing art in Switzerland. Not Mike Ditka.

Ditka – the walking embodiment of a rah-rah football coach – was so committed to a tough-guy style that he dealt away seven picks to move up seven spots to grab Williams. Ditka believed the solution to any of the world’s problems was to run the ball some more – and to do that he needed a lead back. Williams was the most explosive back in college football, and so the coach and GM somehow hoodwinked Saints ownership into dealing away their future for a single player.

The Saints dealt the 12th pick in the ’99 draft, their third, fourth, sixth and seventh round picks in the same draft and their first and third round picks in the following draft. They didn’t own a second in 1999, so were unable to bundle that pick into the deal.

The marriage was a disaster. The Saints stank pre-Williams, and without any supporting talent – because Ditka had traded all the team’s picks away – they bottomed out in 2000, finishing with a 3-13 record. Ditka was fired and Williams would play only two more seasons for the franchise before he was traded to Miami, where he would go on to lead the league in rushing in 2002.

It was a low moment for a (then) lowly franchise. Still: we’ll always have those images of Ditka in a Williams wig.

The Buccaneers pick the wrong player

We’ve all mixed up a couple of names. Most of us, though, are not highly paid pro football execs who spend 12 months microanalysing college football players.

Back in the 1980s, the Bucs were the league’s tragicomedy franchise. And nothing was more Tampa than drafting the wrong player in the first round. The Bucs selected Sean Farrell, a guard out of Penn State, with the 17th pick in 1982. The only issue: they wrote down the wrong name. The Bucs had intended to pick defensive end Booker Reese, but a miscommunication between the GM in the team’s war room and the staff on the ground at the draft meant they wrote the wrong name on the card.

“We were on the phone, but it was hard to hear,” Ken Herock, the team’s director of player personnel, told Sports Illustrated. “I’m hearing Pat [the representative on the ground] say, ‘quiet, quiet, quiet, I can’t hear what he’s saying.’”

Herock called for Reese’s name to be handed in, but Herock wrote down Farrell’s. The team lobbied the league to amend the pick retroactively, but commissioner Pete Rozelle was having none of it. Tampa was eventually able to trade up to the top of the second round to draft Reese.

The miscue worked out, though. Farrell became a mainstay for the Bucs, notching up 59 starts for the team and carving out an 11-year career in the league. Reese would start only seven games in his Bucs career before he was traded to the Rams where he saw limited time and was out of the league by 1985.

Honorable mentions: Aaron Rodgers’ awkward draft night slide in 2005; Eli Manning and Philip Rivers’ jersey swap in 2004; Aaron Rodgers watching Jordan Love get selected in 2020; Washington drafting the same player twice; the CFL drafting a dead player … twice; the Raiders drafting a Mormon who could not play on Sundays; Cedric Benson crying after being selected by the Bears in 2005; the Browns calling the wrong “Jordan Cameron” in 2011; Jimmy Haslam, the Browns’ owner, soliciting advice from a fan on the street before selecting Johnny Manziel in 2014; Bill Belichick’s dog.