The reason why Cleveland Brown legend Joe Thomas didn’t attend the 2007 NFL Draft in New York
The 2025 NFL Draft is just hours away. The event has become a huge show that NFL fans love to watch, but it wasn’t always like that as Thomas explained to the Kelce brothers on their podcast.
It’s hard to imagine a time when the NFL Draft wasn’t such a big deal. Of course for college players looking to make it to the NFL, the draft was always important, but the show itself has just become a huge event as of late.
For NFL Hall of Famer Joe Thomas, the NFL Draft had zero appeal and he didn’t hesitate to say no to the NFL, “Bad news, but I already got plans on Saturday, sorry man, I’m going fishing with my dad.” Thomas had explained that in 2007 it was different than now and he personally wasn’t interested in going to New York to be a part of the show. “I really had never grown up watching the draft,” the former Cleveland Browns offensive lineman said on the New Heights podcast. “I always had a tradition on Saturdays as a kid growing up that I would go fishing with my dad like that was our thing, that was our time together.”
He game Travis and Jason Kelce some context about what led up to him getting chosen as the third overall pick in the 2007 NFL Draft: “Gil Brandt was in charge at that time of deciding who’s coming to the draft. So he calls me up and he’s like ‘hey Joe, congratulations, I want to let you know that you’re gonna be going to New York for the draft. We’ll get somebody in touch that will do the logistics, but we want you to fly out there like on Wednesday and then you got this thing to do and that thing to do,’ and he was hyping it up like I was going to be all excited,” Thomas explained to the Kelce brothers.
Thomas went on to have a Hall of Fame career with the Browns and found out by cell phone that he had been drafted.
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