With the 11th overall pick in the 1979 NFL Draft, the New Orleans Saints were on the clock. The team went 7-9 the season prior and dealt with several problems at the kicker position. New Orleans coach Dick Nolan wanted to fix that problem in the draft, and did so with the team’s first-round pick by drafting Texas’ Russell Erxleben.

Now he’s one of the biggest draft busts of all time.

“Considering the Texas tales about Russell Erxleben’s kicking, it’s a wonder that Francis Ford Coppola didn’t purchase the movie rights to his first professional placekick, then hire Marlon Brando to hold the ball and the entire Chinese army to rush the kicker,” read the first line of a Sports Illustrated article by Joe Marshall on August 27, 1979.

He was highly regarded coming out of college, but it was still a shock to many that he went 11th overall. It’s the second-highest a team has drafted a kicker in NFL history. The highest was Charlie Gogolak, who was picked sixth overall by Washington in the 1966 NFL Draft.

As a Longhorn, Erxleben was a three-time All-American as a punter from 1976-1978. He also kicked a 67-yard field goal, which at the time was the longest in college football history. The caveat to that is tees were allowed on field goals in college football until 1989. It was an impressive kick, and it’s longer than Justin Tucker’s NFL-record field goal of 66 yards.

There was immense pressure on both Erxleben and Nolan to succeed early on, and it didn’t happen. Before the season even started Erxleben was missing easy field goals in the preseason and training camp and wasn’t booting the ball on punts like he did in Austin.

All his life Erxleben was the star athlete. He grew up in Seguin, Texas, and was the star quarterback of his high school team. He was a multi-sport athlete and excelled at every one of them, though none more than football and nothing more than kicking.

Fast forward to Sep. 2, 1979. New Orleans hosted the division rival Atlanta Falcons in Week 1, which doubled as one of the worst NFL debuts ever.

It was fourth down at the Saints 39-yard line when they sent out the punt team in overtime. The snap sailed over Erxleben’s head and he hustled back and picked it up around the two-yard line. He made a move to evade a Falcons defender before attempting to throw the ball away. He was hit as he threw it and it fell right into an Atlanta defender’s hands, who ran it in for the game-winning touchdown.

The rookie kicker and punter suffered an injury in practice the following week and missed the rest of the season. Nolan’s strategy of spending a top draft pick and using him for two roster spots quickly came to a crash.

Erxleben was 2-for-5 on field goals through the first two weeks of the 1980 season before reportedly going into Nolan’s office and telling him he doesn’t want to be the team’s kicker anymore, according to si.com’s Barry Hirstius. He only attempted one field goal in his career after that and spent the next four years as a serviceable punter for New Orleans. He was carted off in his last game after missing a tackle on a punt returner that went for a touchdown, ending his time with the Saints and in essence his football career. He signed with the Detroit Lions and had one punt but was eventually cut and never played again.

“People put you on a pedestal, and you start to believe that you really are up there,” Erxleben said, via the Austin American-Statesman’s Jazmine Uloa. “And then, when it’s all said and done, and you come down and function in the real world, it’s tough.”

The former first-round pick’s blundered NFL career doesn’t compare to his post-football life. Friends and family around Erxleben knew he had the charisma of a salesman, and he quickly built a foreign currency exchange firm called Austin Forex International.

“He was good at peddling pipe dreams he badly wanted to believe in himself,” Uloa wrote in her article. “That, according to his family, friends and even Erxleben, has always been his downfall.”

The company was “covering losses in what regulators with the Texas State Securities Board labeled a massive Ponzi scheme,” according to Uloa.

Erxleben was sentenced to seven years in federal prison in 2000 and ordered to pay almost $30 million. It only took six years after his original sentence before he was arrested a second time. He sold German pre-World War II bonds, again promising investors great returns. It ended up being another Ponzi scheme. He was sentenced to 7.5 years of prison in 2013 and was released in 2019.

From local football hero, to Longhorn legend, to all-time draft bust and eventual scam artist, Erxleben had one of the most interesting lives the NFL has ever seen.