Thursday, April 23rd, 2009 by Monte Burke
Forbes
by Monte Burke
Going into last year’s NFL Draft, football gurus believed the University of Idaho’s David Vobora was a possible mid- to late-round pick. He was a bit undersized for a linebacker (225 lbs.) and played at a college not known for producing NFL players, but he had smarts, and he ran fast. “I knew the draft was a pretty unpredictable science, but I was hoping some team would select me,” says Vobora, 23.
On the second day of the draft, when the middle and late rounds are held, Vobora, his family and a group of his Idaho teammates gathered around a television at the University of Idaho campus in Moscow, Idaho, and waited for Vobora’s name to be announced. And waited … and waited.
Yahoo! BuzzSuddenly it became apparent that Vobora might not be picked at all. He stepped out of the room to talk to his agent on the phone, hatching a back-up plan in case he wasn’t drafted (he was going to try out for teams as a free agent). Then the call-waiting beep went off on his cellphone, and he picked it up. It was the St. Louis Rams’ then-head coach, Scott Linehan, who told him the Rams were about to select him. What Vobora didn’t know was that he was about to become famous, at least to a small group of dedicated NFL junkies.
In Pictures: Last Picks From NFL Drafts Past
At that moment, across the country, Paul Salata, an 82-year-old man in a light gray suit and wide glasses, ambled up to the podium at the NFL draft headquarters in Radio City Music Hall in New York. A former NFL player for the San Francisco 49ers and a lifelong fan of the underdog, Salata was there to perform the same duty he had for three decades: Announcing the name of the last player picked in the NFL Draft, a man who had come to be known as “Mr. Irrelevant” and who would participate in the celebration Salata founded, known as Irrelevant Week.
Salata held up a small piece of paper and proclaimed that with pick number 252, the last in the 2008 NFL draft, the St. Louis Rams were taking David Vobora. “I think he called me a defensive back, and he butchered my last name,” says Vobora. “But that was alright.” Vobora, after all, had just been transformed into a minor celebrity, the final footnote to every NFL Draft. He would forever be a Mr. Irrelevant.
Salata’s daughter, Melanie Salata Fitch, now the chief executive of Irrelevant Week and its spokeswoman, swears that, contrary to what most believe, the term “Mr. Irrelevant” is not meant as a slight to the player. Rather, the moniker is meant to shout out to the world that the position in which a player is drafted is neither here nor there. It is unimportant, it is immaterial–it is, in short, irrelevant.
The truth is that the player selected last in the NFL Draft has only a slim chance of actually playing in the NFL. Of the 33 Mr. Irrelevants, only eight actually played in a game. Most were cut before their first season began.
