Going On A Bit Of A Flashback

So, in my search to find more stuff about our favorite football team to write about, typing "Minnesota Vikings" into Google News gave me a couple of interesting returns. Not from any time recently, mind you. . .but from years gone by.

For example, I found this article from an old edition of the Milwaukee Sentinel. The paper is dated January 25, 1961, and the article in question talks about how the Minnesota Vikings. . .who had yet to actually take the field at this point. . .were getting ready to put together their first ever team. The way their team was constructed, in this case, was by selecting from lists of unprotected players submitted by the other teams in the league.

Couple of things from back then that I, as a "younger" fan of the NFL, find relatively fascinating. Some of this came from other placed I had gone to after seeing the original article.

-Back then, the rosters consisted of only 38 players. Each team was allowed to protect 30 of their 38 players prior to the expansion draft, where the Vikings could take three players from each team. Could you imagine an NFL roster today trying to get by with 38 players?

-The Dallas Cowboys did not have to submit players for selection, as they had only entered the league the year before. The Cowboys went 0-11-1 in their first NFL season. . .but, because the Vikings entered in 1961 as an expansion team, the Cowboys were relegated to the second pick in every round of the college draft, while the Vikings had the first selection in each round.

-The expansion draft took place on January 26, 1961. . .and that actually put it after the 1961 college draft, which took place on December 27 and 28 of 1960. Of course, the draft wasn't nearly the spectacle then that it is now. Neither was the NFL as a whole, for that matter.

-The Vikings had actually taken part in the 1960 AFL Draft (as the ownership group from Minneapolis was green-lighted for an AFL franchise before jumping to the NFL when the chance was offered), but they didn't take any of the players from that draft with them.

There probably isn't a lot of new information here for some of you, but I thought it was something cool that I found while snooping around the internet for potential stories, and I thought I'd share it with you folks.