Editor’s note: This is the fourth installment of The McGinn Files, a weekly series looking back at NFL drafts of the past 35 years. The foundation of the series is Bob McGinn’s transcripts of his interviews with NFL general managers, personnel directors and scouts annually since 1985.



Dave “Hawg” Hanner, the Southeast scout for the Green Bay Packers in the mid-1980s, already had spent more than three decades with the club as a player, assistant coach and personnel man when wide receiver Jerry Rice came out of Mississippi Valley State University headed for the NFL Draft in 1985.



On three occasions, Hanner had been dispatched by the Packers to the campus in Itta Bena (pop. 2,000), a name derived from the Choctaw phrase for forest camp. MVSU had been created by the state legislature in 1946 to train teachers for rural and elementary schools. The 54-year-old Hanner, a native of Parkin, Ark., kept beating the backroads of Mississippi to make a...