Detroit Lions draft picks (1936–1969)

The Detroit Lions are a professional American football team based in Detroit, Michigan. The Lions compete in the National Football League (NFL) as a member of the North Division of the National Football Conference. The franchise was founded in Portsmouth, Ohio, as the Portsmouth Spartans and joined the NFL on July 12, 1930. After being purchased by George A. Richards in 1934, the franchise was relocated to Detroit and renamed to the Detroit Lions in reference to the city's Major League Baseball franchise, the Detroit Tigers. The team plays its home games at Ford Field in Downtown Detroit.

The NFL draft, officially known as the "NFL Annual Player Selection Meeting", is an annual event which serves as the league's most common source of player recruitment. The draft order is determined based on the previous season's standings; the teams with the worst win–loss records receive the earliest picks. Teams that qualified for the NFL playoffs select after non-qualifiers, and their order depends on how far they advanced, using their regular season record as a tie-breaker. The final two selections in the first round are reserved for the Super Bowl runner-up and champion. Draft picks are tradable and players or other picks can be acquired with them.

In 1936, the Lions took part in the first NFL draft of college football players. With the eighth pick of the first round of that draft, Sid Wagner, a guard out of Michigan State University, became the Lions' first draft selection. In addition to the annual draft, the Lions took part in the 1950 All-America Football Conference (AAFC) dispersal draft. This draft was organized after the AAFC, which was formed as a competing league in 1946, merged with the NFL. Three teams from the AAFC were admitted into the NFL, while the remaining players from the five defunct teams became automatically eligible for selection by an existing NFL team in the dispersal draft. Thirteen of the players drafted by the Lions between 1936 and 1969 have been inducted into the Pro Football Hall of Fame. The Lions took part in every draft from 1936 to 1969, prior to the AFL–NFL merger and the formation of the modern draft in 1970.