The draft business spawned an early unforgettable character

Long before Mel Kiper Jr., Todd McShay and Daniel Jeremiah began dominating the NFL draft landscape with their college prospect breakdowns and mock drafts, a pair of insurance salesmen from Philadelphia had a harebrained idea to turn their passion for scouting into a money-making endeavor.

Carl and Pete Marasco had no idea at the time, but when they convinced Pro Football Weekly publisher Arthur Arkush to run their first player rankings ahead of the 1969 draft, they were spawning a phenomenon that flourishes to this day.

“I don’t want this to sound egotistical in any way, but we basically invented or created the independent draft analysis business,” said Hub Arkush, whose family published the widely popular and nationally distributed Pro Football Weekly, at the time the only weekly publication that enabled fans to keep up with the favorite team no matter where they lived.

What developed over time was an industry that has made mock drafts a national obsession. Draft experts like Kiper and McShay have become almost as recognizable as the players they analyze. And in the case of a reclusive kid from Brooklyn who was too frail and scrawny to pursue an actual playing career, what the Arukush family started produced one of the most mysterious football characters of all time.

Working out of a tiny, messy apartment, the wispy, rail-thin Joel Buchsbaum talked his way into a writing job with Pro Football Weekly as a teenager in the late 1970s and eventually became an underground cult hero and inspirational source for modern-day draft experts like Jeremiah.

When the Marasco brothers left Pro Football Weekly for jobs in pro football, it was Buchsbaum who replaced them. And he took it to a new level.

But only after hounding PFW to give him a chance.

“To the point where we finally said fine, send us your stuff and we’ll take a look,” Arkush said. “We didn’t know at the time we had a unique character as much as we realized he really knew his stuff.”

Planting a seed

Between his work with PFW and his highly anticipated radio work with KMOX in St. Louis and KTRH in Houston, Buchsbaum planted the seed for what we see today.

“I remember being a kid and reading (his work) and just being locked in on the draft as I watched it,” Jeremiah said. “And the thing is, in those days, you didn’t get the shoulder programming leading up to the draft like you do today. You read, and then you watched the event. There was no run-up.”

The annual Pro Football Weekly and Scout’s Notebook and Draft Guides Buchsbaum produced became the bible for hardcore football fans and draft fanatics across the country. The meticulous, detailed, handwritten player breakdowns he’d send his editors by way of spiral-bound notebooks were so spot on and informative they earned him the respect and friendship of NFL coaches and executives across the league.

Aside from his annual trip to Manhattan for the NFL draft, Buchsbaum normally only left his apartment to walk his dog, visit his parents or go to the gym. His communication with his bosses was almost exclusively over the phone. He never went to actual games, merely relying on the information he gleaned from the hundreds of sources he trusted and whatever game footage he could acquire.

Buchsbaum eschewed computers and typewriters to produce his work in longhand, much to the chagrin of his editors, who then had to edit and transcribe his work to format it for print. Buchsbaum was not a trained or even natural writer, so editing his work was a challenge. But his PFW bosses eventually realized what they assumed was a rough-around-the-edges writer was actually a unique character articulating his player analysis in his own distinct language.

“We figured out early on that some of the charm was in not editing Joel,” Arkush said. “A lot of this really came from letting Joel be Joel. And that’s part of what became the mystique.”

Not many people actually knew what Buchsbaum looked like, and only a handful of people ever saw the inside of his apartment, which was so messy and disorganized his mother refused to come visit.

Arkush was among the few who visited Buchsbaum’s home, making a trip to Brooklyn with one of his PFW editors to help console Buchsbaum after the death of his father. Upon entering the apartment, Arkush noticed an unopened box peeking out among the stacks of VHS tapes and spiral notebooks. It was the computer that Arkush had sent Buchsbaum two years before.

“I said, Joel, those computers cost a fortune,” Arkush remembers, laughing. “Before we left, we made sure to get everything set up for him, to the point where he started sending us some of his work on floppy disks.”

A well-respected voice

In spite of his reclusive nature and eccentricities, Buchsbaum became a well respected figure within pro football circles and established a devoted following among football fans starved for information about the next wave of NFL stars.

To put his impact into perspective, when Buchsbaum died in 2002, a memorial service was put together in his honor at the NFL scouting combine. Of the 150 people who attended, Arkush said there were two NFL owners, seven head coaches, 12 general managers and 60 or so scouts.

The first person to speak was Bill Belichick who, unbeknownst to almost everyone, had developed a close alliance with Buchsbaum over the years.

“And in front of all these NFL luminaries Bill’s opening line was: ‘Joel Buchsbaum was my best friend,’ ” Arkush said.

His influence reached all the way to San Diego, where Jeremiah, a touted athlete who would eventually play quarterback at Northeastern Louisiana in 1997 and Appalachian State from 1998 to 2000, read and reread Buchsbaum’s work to prepare as a young fan for the NFL draft and to dream up lineup scenarios for his beloved San Diego Chargers and Dallas Cowboys.

“I used to wear out the lined school paper thinking, ‘OK, if we got this guy and then got that guy we’d be set,” Jeremiah said. “It’s all I did.”

After his playing career ended, Jeremiah was a scout for the Baltimore Ravens, Cleveland Browns and Philadelphia Eagles. Today he is one of the leading draft analysts for the NFL Network.

It was Buchsbaum, and later Kiper, who influenced him.

The inclusion of ESPN, the internet and the NFL Network to the draft process has taken Buchsbaum’s work to unimagined levels. But as Jeremiah points out, the same draft analysis that drew him in as a kid still attracts fans to this day.

Just on a grander scale.

“I just think it’s about hope,” Jeremiah said.

Contact Vincent Bonsignore at vbonsignore@reviewjournal.com. Follow @VinnyBonsignore onTwitter.