Drafts in the early 1970s were long by modern standards, with 442 players selected. If the 1971 NFL Draft is remembered for anything, it’s for having three quarterbacks go with the first three picks in the draft: Stanford’s Jim Plunkett, Mississippi’s Archie Manning, and Santa Clara’s Dan Pastorini. But more than any other draft in NFL history, the 1971 NFL Draft represented the changing landscape of college football — and the country.

Fifty years ago, many Division 1 schools still operated independent from any conference affiliation. There were 56 players selected from such schools in the ’71 Draft, including 10 from Houston, 6 from Pittsburgh, 5 from Notre Dame, and 4 each from Penn State, Tulane, and Boston College.

The Big 10 led all conferences with 52 players drafted. That number just to 60 players drafted from schools in the 2020 version of the Big 10, which you reach by including the players drafted from Nebraska and Penn State.

The SEC had 31 players drafted in 1971, and 46 players if you include existing SEC schools not in the conference fifty years ago. ^[1]Those schools: South Carolina, Missouri, Texas A&M, and Arkansas.

The Pac-8 (the predecessor to the current Pac-12) had 29 players drafted, and 44 players chosen from schools now in the Pac-12. ^[2]Adding Colorado, Arizona and Arizona State, and Utah.

The Big 8 conference (the predecessor to the current Big 12) had 34 players drafted; the Southwest Conference (another predecessor to the Big 12) had 23 draftees that year, with players from Texas and Arkansas making up the majority of that group. There were 35 players drafted in 1971 among modern Big 12 schools.

The ACC had only 11 players drafted, although there were 26 players drafted from schools currently in the ACC.

But there was one group of schools that sent over 60 players to the NFL via the 1971 Draft.  And this group wasn’t any conference, but an affiliated group of small schools that didn’t compete against the Division 1 powers of its day.

• Tennessee State, located in Nashville, had an incredible 9 players drafted after a perfect 10-0 season. Meanwhile, the Tennessee Volunteers went 11-1 and won the SEC, finishing 4th in the AP Poll. The Vols had just three players drafted in ’71.
• Grambling State, located in Louisiana less than ten miles from Louisiana Tech, had 9 players selected in the ’71 Draft.
• Texas Southern, based in Houston, had 7 players drafted… making the city of Houston a football powerhouse with 20 players drafted (including 3 from Rice).
• Alcorn State, with its campus in Lorman, Mississippi — about two hours north of LSU — had 6 players drafted.
• The 10th pick in the draft was Isiah Robertson, who would go on to be the 1971 Defensive Rookie of the Year.  He came from Southern University, located in Baton Rouge, LA; meanwhile, LSU did not have a player drafted until the 7th round.
• The University of Maryland didn’t have any players drafted, but the University of Maryland Eastern Shore sent two players to the NFL via the 1971 Draft.
• The University of Texas was crowned college football national champions in 1969, and then went 10-1 in 1970.  In the ’71 Draft, the school had 9 players drafted, but none of them lasted long in the NFL.
  • Meanwhile, tiny Bishop College in east Texas sent Tony McGee to the NFL, who played for 14 seasons and had a 10-sack season with Washington at the age of 34 in 1983.
  • Bivian Lee, born in Austin, Texas, played in more games than any Longhorn drafted in 1971; Lee was one of three players drafted out of Prairie View A&M University, located in between Austin and Houston.

To the modern eye, this sort of draft pool is unthinkable. How could so much NFL talent came out of these small schools that did not even play in the top division in college sports?  Why was the 1971 NFL Draft dominated not by the Big 10 or the SEC, but by schools like Tennessee State, Grambling State, and Texas Southern that have no real presence in the modern NFL Draft?

Because up until the late ’60s and the early ’70s, college football in most of the southeast and Texas was segregated. The majority of teams in the SEC had their first black player take the field in 1970 or 1971. And when Texas and Arkansas met in one of the games of the century in 1969, both schools had all-white rosters.

Southern black athletes often saw refuge in the Big 10 during the ’50s and ’60s. Maybe the greatest guard ever, Jim Parker, was born in Macon, Georgia, but he went to Ohio State in the mid-’50s before beginning his Hall of Fame career with the Colts. George Webster, a game-changing outside linebacker with the Oilers, grew up in South Carolina and wanted to play for Clemson; the political reality of the time made that impossible, and he instead went to Michigan State, where he helped the Spartans win a national title. The ones who didn’t go up north typically went to Historically Black Colleges and Universities, with Grambling State, Tennessee State, Jackson State, Texas Southern, Florida A&M, Alcorn State, North Carolina Central, Prairie View A&M, Morgan State, and Maryland Eastern Shore being some of the most prominent.

The group of HBCUs had a sizable impact on the NFL Draft during the 10-year period from 1967 to 1976. The success of the schools in the Draft peaked in ’71, but national attention was being gained a few years earlier. William N. Wallace, a longtime sports reporter for the New York Times, wrote about the rise of HBCUs in the NFL in fall of 1967.

Later, Tennessee State’s Too Tall Jones broke another barrier when he was the first player selected in the ’74 Draft; his teammate, Waymond Bryant, was drafted three picks later.   Walter Payton went 4th overall in 1975, and Doug Williams was a historic selection as the first quarterback from an HBCU taken in the first round. But that was about it: by 1979, the first player selected from an HBCU was Bruce Radford with the 77th pick. By the early to mid ’70s, most of the top black high school athletes in the south were going to play integrated college football in the Big 8, the SWC, or the SEC; that meant the NFL Draft stopped focusing on HBCUs by the end of the decade.  In ’74, the same year that Jones went first overall, Alabama RB Wilbur Jackson was the 9th pick in the Draft: he was the first black football player offered a scholarship by Bear Bryant.

The dominance by HBCUs was a peculiar one — it is an honor worth celebrating but one made only possible by structural racism: it was bound to end as soon as the top schools in the southeast and Texas began admitting the best black high school athletes in their state. But due to racism, it also didn’t begin for awhile, either: remember that pro football didn’t reintegrate until after World War II, and many teams still had formal or informal restrictions on black players in the late ’50s. When Vince Lombardi joined the Packers, they had just one black player (a defensive end from the Big 10).  The upstart American Football League helped tremendously with integration, but NFL teams still had healthy speculation toward (along with a lack of exposure to) HBCUs into the late ’60s. A decade later, the top black athletes in the south were playing in the SEC.

Therefore, there was only a window of time where black high school athletes could feasibly go to the NFL, there was legitimate option locally (an HSBC) that didn’t require traveling to the west coast or to Big 10 country, but the top local schools barred admissions. That window was in the ’60s and ’70s, peaking in the middle from ’67 to ’76. And that was the environment that made 1971 the peak year for HBCUs in NFL Draft history.