The Long, Long, 1952 College Draft

If you're an NFL fan who thinks that league's draft taking four days is far too long, you might find yourself thankful that they don't run it like the first Big Four college draft.

The rules for it were ironed out on April 5th during a meeting of league (Big Four) officials. 

The driving force was market size; Ottawa and Hamilton did not have access to as great a number of local amateur players as Toronto and Montreal did. The Rough Riders were defending champions, mind you, but evidently this was still perceived as a disadvantage.

Coming up with the rules was not an issue because the initial selections were made that day and reported in the newspaper on April 7th.

Most sources, including cfl.ca as I write this, consider this to be the entire draft class and name only these players.

It was not. Teams could continue to make selections right up to training camp, apparently. Ottawa made their next selection on April 14th.

Then Ottawa's next selection was announced on May 3rd.

And then the final pick was revealed in the first week of July.

So all told, the draft took approximately three months to complete.

Now something changed along the way. The league as a whole announced the selections named its selections about a week later. Ponton above is not among them but we have a new name in Dannis Masulka from McMaster.

And yet...Ponton was on the rookie picture! Here is your 1952 draft class. I suspect that Ponton's omission above is simply an error.

Vince Colliza is not included in the picture. He was acquired by Hamilton in late July or early August about 10 days after the shot was taken.

A July 31st article made it seem as though Colliza was signed as a free agent by the Ti-Cats, but one from a few days later (in a Windsor paper) provides details for a trade of his rights to Hamilton. Again, this is a guess, but Hamilton might have signed him before realizing they weren't allowed to, so some sort of compensation had to be worked out.

All of the clipping above are from the Ottawa Citizen. The Ottawa Journal did not give the draft as much attention but it was more detailed in its reports when it did. It did explain that the initial pool of players numbered 17 but more were added later to come to a total of 28, or seven per club. I count eight for Ottawa but that's a mystery for another day.