1976 NFL expansion draft

The 1976 National Football League expansion draft was held March 30–31, 1976. The expansion teams, the Seattle Seahawks and the Tampa Bay Buccaneers, each selected 39 players from the other 26 NFL teams. When one player was chosen from an existing team, that team was then permitted to protect two additional players. The expansion teams continued until three players had been picked from each of the existing teams.

The expansion draft was originally scheduled for January 23–24, but was postponed when the owners of the Seahawks and Buccaneers filed a lawsuit against the players' union with worries that the organization would try to prevent the draft. The court case delayed both the expansion draft and the annual college draft.

Seattle Seahawk selections

Tampa Bay selections

References

Expansion draft

An expansion draft, in professional sports, occurs when a sports league decides to create one or more new expansion teams or franchises. This occurs mainly in North American sports. One of the ways of stocking the new team or teams is an expansion draft. Although how each league conducts them varies, and they vary from occasion to occasion, the system is usually something similar to the following:

Each existing team is told it can "protect" a certain number of its existing contracted players by furnishing their names to the league office on or before a certain date. The expansion team(s) then are allowed to select players not on the protected lists in a manner somewhat similar to an entry draft. There are generally a maximum number of players that can be selected from any one team, at least without the team losing the player receiving something in compensation such as a future entry draft pick.

Teams subject to losing players usually tend to put most if not all of the players they truly need to stay competitive on the protected list. This means that the expansion franchise is usually left to choose among players who are old, injury prone, failing to develop as the teams had intended, or perhaps so highly compensated that a team wishes to remove them from the payroll. For this reason, expansion teams are often noncompetitive in their early years in a league, although the advent of the free agent system has modified this somewhat.

Tampa Bay

Tampa Bay is a large natural harbor and estuary connected to the Gulf of Mexico on the west central coast of Florida, comprising Hillsboro Bay, McKay Bay, Old Tampa Bay, Middle Tampa Bay, and Lower Tampa Bay. The surrounding area is home to about 4 million residents, making it a heavily used commercial and recreational waterway but putting much stress on the bay's ecosystem, which once teemed with enough wildlife to easily support an extensive indigenous culture. Much greater care has been taken in recent decades to mitigate the effects of human habitation on Tampa Bay, and water quality has slowly improved over time.

The term "Tampa Bay" is sometimes used as shorthand to refer to all or parts of the Tampa Bay area, which comprises many towns and cities in several counties surrounding the large body of water. Local marketing and branding efforts (including several professional sports teams, tourist boards, and chambers of commerce) commonly use the moniker "Tampa Bay", furthering the misconception that it is the name of a particular municipality when this is not the case.