NFL Draft attendance over the last decade
The NFL Draft used to be a television event. That was the whole idea, the entire design of it. You sat at home on a Thursday night in April, watched Roger Goodell walk to the podium in a suit, and found out where your team’s future was headed.
Maybe you had friends over. Maybe you ordered pizza. But you did not travel.
You did not camp outside overnight. You did not stand in a crowd of hundreds of thousands of strangers in a city that had transformed its entire downtown into a stage for the occasion. That was not what the draft was.
It was a broadcast, not a destination. Then the NFL made a decision that changed everything. In 2015, the league moved the draft out of New York for the first time, taking it to Chicago.
Two hundred thousand people showed up. The league looked at that number and understood immediately that it had been leaving something on the table for decades. The draft was not just a transaction where teams selected players.
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