Meet Mr. Irrelevant 2026: Red Murdock, The Buffalo LB Who Closed The Draft

Every NFL Draft ends with a tradition older than most of the players in it: the final pick is crowned "Mr. Irrelevant," and the 2026 edition went to Buffalo linebacker Red Murdock, selected by the Denver Broncos with the 257th and last pick on April 26. Utah tight end Dallen Bentley had gone one slot earlier at No. 256, but it was Murdock who inherited the title, the lore, and the festivities that come with being the last name called in Pittsburgh. As Mr. Irrelevant labels go, this one fits a player whose entire path has been about being overlooked and then refusing to stay that way.

The biographical arc is the reason Murdock is more than a punchline. He grew up in Virginia, played high school football at Hopewell, and received zero Division I scholarship offers out of high school. He went to Fork Union Military Academy for a post-graduate year, helped that team to an undefeated season, and only then earned a single Division I offer — from Buffalo. That is the unglamorous, brick-by-brick route that produces a player who arrives at the draft as an afterthought to the talent evaluators and a known quantity to anyone who actually watched the tape.

And the tape produced a genuinely historic stat line. Murdock holds the NCAA record for career forced fumbles with 17 — not a school record, not a conference record, the national record. In the 2024 season alone he piled up 156 total tackles, the second-most in the entire FBS, to go with two sacks and an interception, and he tied the NCAA single-season record with seven forced fumbles. A player who leads the country's record book in a splash defensive category and finishes second nationally in tackles is not a typical seventh-round, last-pick profile. He is a production outlier whose draft slot was driven by the things the combine measures rather than the things the box score does.

The Mr. Irrelevant tradition itself dates to 1976, the invention of former NFL receiver Paul Salata, who created the designation and its attendant "Irrelevant Week" celebration in Newport Beach, California, to honor the player nobody else would. For most of its history the title was a charity-driven novelty, a way of giving the draft's last man a moment in a process designed to ignore him. The week includes a parade, a banquet, and the tongue-in-cheek "Lowsman Trophy" — a bronze figure fumbling a football, the inverse of the Heisman's stiff-arm.

The tradition gained real teeth in 2022, when the 49ers.html" style="color:inherit;text-decoration:underline;text-decoration-color:#c8102e;">San Francisco 49ers used the final pick — No. 262 — on Iowa State quarterback Brock Purdy. Purdy became the first Mr. Irrelevant to start a playoff game, then to win one, then to start a Super Bowl, permanently changing how the last pick is perceived. Before Purdy, Mr. Irrelevant was a feel-good footnote. After Purdy, every final pick carries the faint, statistically improbable but no longer impossible suggestion that the last name called could become something. It is a thin reed, but it is no longer a joke.

For Denver, the selection is a low-cost bet on an extreme-traits defender with elite ball-production instincts. Linebackers who force seventeen career fumbles are not common, and a player who tied an NCAA single-season forced-fumble record in 2024 brings a specific, repeatable skill — knocking the ball loose — that translates to special teams and sub-package roles even if he never becomes a full-time starter. The Broncos are not asking the 257th pick to anchor a defense. They are asking him to make a roster on motor, special-teams value, and the turnover-creating knack that the record book says is real.

The larger point Murdock's selection makes is the one the Mr. Irrelevant tradition has quietly made for fifty years: the draft's ranking system is a probabilistic guess, not a verdict. A player can hold a national record, finish second in the country in tackles, and still be the last name called — because the process weights traits, testing, and projection over what a player has already proven he can do. Whether Red Murdock becomes a contributor or a trivia answer, he closes the 2026 draft with a résumé that argues the board got at least one thing wrong about him. The last pick usually has a story like that. This one's is better than most.