USFL Territorial Draft

The United States Football League besides having a traditional Collegiate Draft, it also practiced an annual Territorial Draft, in which teams from the league would have “protected” colleges from their respective states, from which they could select a number of players without them being subjected to the regular Collegiate Draft.

This process was conceived by USFL founder David Dixon, in order to keep geographic interest in the franchises. With the Territorial Draft, local college or professional football players, would end up playing for the state's USFL team.

Each team was assigned a five college pool that were deemed to be in the team's region, from which it could select a predetermined number of players.

The territorial selections were conducted by the teams, who communicated their choices to the league's office in writing. Once "drafted", a player's USFL rights belonged to that club, and were ineligible from selection in the regular college draft.

The league's office in turn would send out these lists to all teams, prohibiting them from drafting these players in the regular college draft.

...
Wikipedia