Monopsonistic labor market institutions, such as amateur drafts and free agency restrictions, are often justified by their competitive balance generating properties. In this paper we re-examine the balancing effect of the amateur draft for the National Football League. We extend an earlier treatment of this issue by Grier and Tollison (J Econ Behav Organ 33: 136–149, 1994) by incorporating the unbalanced scheduling policy of the league, relative team payrolls, and team injury rates into our empirical model. We find that the college draft has a quantitatively strong and statistically significant effect on team performance even when incorporating several significant controls.