The first Irrelevant Week got off to an appropriately madcap start.

The last player chosen in 1976, Kelvin Kirk, by the Steelers, initially thought he was being mocked. So Salata called the team’s owner, Art Rooney, whom he knew from his brief stay in Pittsburgh, and asked him to tell Kirk that he was in fact being honored. Kirk agreed to participate, but missed his flight to California and the parade in his honor.

That didn’t stop the parade from going forward.

Salata went into a grocery store and persuaded a butcher, who looked like a football player, to stand in for Kirk. People cheered and waved, apparently not realizing, or caring, that he was a plant for Kirk.

As his fill-in was answering questions during a news conference after the parade, Kirk arrived from a later flight and took over midway through. The reporters kept asking questions as if nothing had happened, Salata said.

Kirk’s N.F.L. career, like those of many other Mr. Irrelevants, was brief. He was cut after training camp that summer, and ended up in Canada, where he played for several years. He died in 2003.

Mr. Irrelevant has added a dash of whimsy to the rules- and order-obsessed N.F.L. The league provides the platform for the tradition to continue but is not involved in Irrelevant Week, other than to provide items to be auctioned for charity.

Teams, though, have come to realize that picking Mr. Irrelevant can turn into a media bonanza, so much so that they have tried to trade for the last pick in the draft. There is now the “Salata Rule,” which prohibits a team from deliberately passing on a pick for the purpose of choosing last.