which was in the record.  He considered, among other things, the salaries which the Atlanta team was assuming under the acquired contracts.  He also compared the veterans as a group to those rookies who were selected in the first three rounds of the 1965 college draft, and said that the veterans would have been more valuable to a professional team because of their experience.


65
James Finks, General Manager of the Chicago Bears and former General Manager of the Minnesota Vikings, arrived at a valuation of $6,825,000.  Finks' valuation also reflected personal knowledge of the players, consideration of the data in the record, a comparison of the forty-two veterans with the rookies selected in the top rounds of the college draft, and the assumption that the experiencewere willing to give them up.  Yet there was ample evidence that, in fact, the veterans were considered superior as a group to the college rookies.  Each man acquired in the expansion draft had made an NFL team.  A number of them had been starters for their selling teams.  The evidence also showed:


73
The forty-two players had a total of 149 years of prior experience in the NFL, or an average of approximately 3.55 years per man.


74
Twenty-five players were on Atlanta's active roster at the start of the 1966 season; of those, eighteen started regularly and the other seven were starters on occasion.  All but three of the twenty-five players wound up the season on the Falcons' active roster.


75
Of the seventeen players who did