The 1986 NFL Draft was the procedure by which National Football League teams selected amateur college football players. It is officially known as the NFL Annual Player Selection Meeting. The draft was held April 29–30, 1986. The league also held a supplemental draft after the regular draft and before the regular season.

To date, no member of the 1986 NFL Draft has been inducted into the Professional Football Hall of Fame.

The National Football League Draft is an annual event in which the National Football League (NFL) teams select eligible college football players and it is their most common source of player recruitment. The basic design of the draft is that each team is given a position in the drafting order in reverse order relative its record in the previous year—the last place gets positioned first. With this position, the team can either select a player or trade their position to another team for other positions, a player, or players, or any combination thereof. After each team had utilized its position in the drafting order, whether by trading it or selecting a player, a round would be complete. Certain aspects of the draft, including team positioning and the number of rounds in the draft, have seen revisions since its first creation in 1936, but the fundamental methodology has remained the same. The original rationale in creating the draft was to increase the competitive parity between the teams as the worst team would, idealistically, have chosen the best player available.

Leslie Claudis O'Neal (born May 7, 1964, Little Rock, Arkansas) is a former football defensive end who played 13 years in the National Football League for the San Diego Chargers, St. Louis Rams, and the Kansas City Chiefs from 1986 to 1999.

In 1986, O'Neal was chosen as the NFL Defensive Rookie of the Year. He was a six-time Pro Bowl Player. He played college football at Oklahoma State University.

Daniel Constantine "Dan" Marino, Jr. (born September 15, 1961) is a retired American football quarterback who played for the Miami Dolphins in the National Football League. The last quarterback of the Quarterback Class of 1983 to be taken in the first round, Marino became one of the most prolific quarterbacks in league history, holding or having held almost every major NFL passing record. Despite never being on a Super Bowl-winning team, he is recognized as one of the greatest quarterbacks in American football history. Best remembered for his quick release and powerful arm, Marino led the Dolphins to the playoffs ten times in his seventeen-season career. He was inducted into the Hall of Fame in 2005.

Marino was born in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, of Italian and Polish ancestry. He is the oldest child of Daniel and Veronica (Kolczynski) Marino, and has two younger sisters, Cindi and Debbie. His father delivered newspapers for the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette. Marino grew up on Parkview Avenue in the South Oakland neighborhood of Pittsburgh, and attended St. Regis Catholic Elementary School. He attended Central Catholic High School in Pittsburgh, where he started in baseball, and won Parade All-American honors in football. He was drafted in the 4th round by the Kansas City Royals baseball team in the 1979 amateur draft, but decided to play college football instead.

Christopher James "Chris" Berman (born May 10, 1955), also known by the nickname Boomer, is an American sportscaster. He anchors SportsCenter, Monday Night Countdown, Sunday NFL Countdown, U.S. Open golf, the Stanley Cup Finals, and other programming on ESPN and ABC Sports.

Berman was born in Greenwich, Connecticut and raised in Irvington, New York. He is Jewish on his father's side. During his childhood he went to Camp Winnebago in Fayette, Maine. In 1970, he attended the Hackley School and Brown University from which he graduated in 1977 with a degree in history.

Berman moved to WNVR in Waterbury, Connecticut. He was eventually hired at Hartford's WVIT-TV to do weekend sports at $23 per shift. He joined ESPN in 1979 a month after its founding and has been with the network since. Along with Bob Ley, he is one of ESPN's longest-tenured employees. Berman, who is generally known to be heavy-set, often jokes that he now uses his original ESPN jacket from 1979 when he was much skinnier. He is the host of Monday Night Countdown, replacing previous host Stuart Scott. In 1988 and 1989, he hosted ESPN's first game show, Boardwalk and Baseball's Super Bowl of Sports Trivia which was taped at the now-defunct Boardwalk and Baseball amusement park in Orlando, Florida.