For football addicts who have had to go three months without an NFL fix, this weekend should bring relief. The 2007 National Football League Draft will be held at Radio City Music Hall, but the action will span the country, across the 32 “war rooms” of the league’s team training complexes. For draftniks who have spent months analyzing the top college talents and where they should place in the draft pool, the NFL Draft is akin to a national holiday.

It doesn’t matter to devoted NFL fans that baseball season has been under way for nearly a month, or that the NBA and NHL are in the midst of playoffs. No, for them, it’s time to salute the most perfect form of socialism ever invented. The NFL, in which 32 owners share revenue mostly equitably, has devised a system of divvying up college athletes that would be illegal in most circumstances.

The draft is legal only because the league’s owners and the NFL Players Association signed a collective bargaining agreement that eliminates any individual rights for the 225 top college players. So a top athlete can either sign with the team that drafts him or force a trade, as John Elway did in 1983 because he didn’t want to play for Robert Irsay’s Baltimore Colts, or as Eli Manning did with the San Diego Chargers in 2004 — the Chargers gave in to Manning ‘s wishes, trading the overall first pick in the NFL grab bag to the Giants, who then selected Manning.

In 1986, Bo Jackson decided that he wasn’t cut out to be a running back for the Tampa Bay Buccaneers, so he opted instead for the major leagues. He signed with the Kansas City Royals, and in 1987 returned to football as a “hobby,” signing with Al Davis’s Los Angeles Raiders after being selected in the final round of that year’s NFL draft.

In the last quarter of a century, Elway, Manning, and Jackson are the only top players to join the ranks of “draft dodgers.” When the United States Football League folded after its 1985 season, top players were left with few choices. A player could go to Canada, where he would inevitably lose millions in guaranteed bonus money; he could sit out the season on the chance he might be drafted the next year, or he could play another sport like Jackson, Deion Sanders, and Ricky Williams, who all took a swing at baseball. (Jackson and Sanders were major leaguers; Williams never made it past the New York-Penn short season Class-A league.)

A player who might complain it’s unfair he can’t shop his talents to 10 or 12 potential employers, just as his college peers seeking jobs after graduation can do, is likely to be labeled a troublemaker and could see his stock plummet. Instead, a player and his agent will accept their fate, take the bonus money, and hope to last for a minimum of four years, when they can not only fully collect on a contract (NFL players are guaranteed only their bonuses) but also explore free agency.

Most football fans blindly accept the notion that a draft is necessary, rarely asking questions beyond that. Football fanatics will arrive in their NFL best — from war paint in the team colors to outfits scary enough for the annual Halloween Parade in Greenwich Village — read what ESPN analyst Mel Kiper Jr. or any one of the 200 or so draft gurus have to say about the NFL’s prospective employees, and jump up and down eager to have their mugs shot for “SportsCenter.”

It’s a tough crowd. But football fans are seldom aware of just how tough things are inside a favorite team’s “war room.” In each city that has an NFL franchise, a war room that resembles the old smoke-filled backroom at a political convention becomes the meeting place where coaches and scouts hash things out, and on rare occasions, even come to blows while discussing the merits of a particular player on draft day.

The stakes are so high some organizations have accused others of bugging their war rooms. After all, teams are investing millions in first-round picks, and a “bust” could lead a disappointed owner to sack his entire personnel department. These days, NFL owners have coaches and general managers on a short leash and expect a team’s fortunes to get better in a hurry. Gone are the five-year plans to build a franchise into a championship contender.

In the weeks leading up to the draft, NFL personnel typically guard the names of players they might want as closely as one would espionage secrets. Once the top five or six players are taken, the boredom should kick in for the Radio City Music Hall spectators, but it doesn’t. The league’s fans are often glued to the in-house NFL Network feed, watching mostly pointless reports from analysts stationed at various NFL war rooms. Come to think of it, those analysts are not unlike the retired political strategists on CNN, MSNBC, and Fox News who weigh in about what they would do in similar situations.

In essence, NFL owners have created a system in which they don’t actually have to compete for the most gifted college athletes, who are only too eager for positions in the rarified business of professional football. The best applicants automatically go to the league’s franchises. Imagine representatives from the country’s accounting companies going to Wharton and Harvard Business School and handpicking new employees without those students having the benefit of interviews or shopping around résumés. It simply would not happen.

Still, students headed for the NFL are in many ways in far better shape than their non-football-playing peers, who may struggle to land jobs and internships. The 250 or so drafted players are guaranteed jobs with the promise of lucrative contracts and large bonuses. Of course, whether they hold on to those positions depends on how well they perform once they report for duty next month. And those who aren’t drafted can offer their services to teams of their choosing, even if the odds of finding a place on an NFL roster is terribly slim.

evanjweiner@yahoo.com