NFL will reportedly skip supplemental draft this year

The league will stay on summer break after deciding to not hold the event for the fourth time in five years.

The NFL owns the sporting calendar almost every month of the year with one notable exception.

From the time that the league’s 32 teams finish up the offseason program with mandatory minicamps in mid-June until the start of training camps in late July, the league calendar is mostly quiet outside of a few contract announcements or news that a player has gotten himself in trouble off the field.

The league has tried to fill this dead period over the years by holding a supplemental draft in the summer for players who for one reason or another were not eligible for the full NFL Draft but suddenly find themselves in need of employment at the professional level. If a team selects a player, it loses its selection in the corresponding round in the next year’s full draft.

The Cleveland Browns are no stranger to the supplemental draft, having made two notable selections over the years. One was wide receiver Josh Gordon, a 2012 selection who holds the franchise record for receiving yards in a single season with 1,646 in 2013. Gordon may also hold the record for the highest number of league suspensions and comebacks in league history.

The other was quarterback Bernie Kosar, who gamed the system to maneuver himself to the Browns in the 1985 supplemental draft. Kosar would lead the Browns to five consecutive playoff berths and three appearances in the AFC Championship Game during his time in Cleveland and remains the last great quarterback the franchise has seen in the huddle.

Those days are in the past, as is the supplemental draft, at least for this year after Wednesday’s announcement that the NFL will not hold the summertime selection process. For whatever reason, the supplemental draft has lost its appeal among general managers, as the two players who were eligible in 2023 were not selected, and the league did not even bother to hold the event in 2020, 2021 or, 2022.

The last player selected was safety Jalen Thompson, who was picked by the Arizona Cardinals in the fifth round in 2019.

With the way things are trending, Thompson may soon find himself as the answer to the trivia question of “who was the player selected in the final NFL supplemental draft.”