The NFL Draft in Kansas City was another sign that the event is no longer suitable for a concert hall or arena setting.
Hundreds of thousands of football fans gathered in Kansas City and were passionate about the draft from the first round on Thursday night to the final pick on Saturday afternoon.
On his podcast on Monday, ESPN NFL insider Adam Schefter said the trend with the draft has now to stage it in major gathering spaces in NFL cities to make it a festival-type atmosphere.
“Not only is the NFL moving cities, going to a different city every year, but I believe that we’ve seen the last – for the foreseeable future – of the indoor drafts,” Schefter said. “Because there are too many people that want to be there! They can’t stick it inside anywhere. It’s got to be outside with hundreds of thousands of people.”
Adam added that nine cities were following NFL officials around in Kansas City, vying for the opportunity to host the draft in 2025 and beyond. Next year’s draft is in Detroit, where a countdown clock has been hyping fans up for two years.
Schefter said the success of the draft in city settings, with Nashville in 2019 being the new precedent, poses an opportunity for cities that wouldn’t otherwise host a Super Bowl to host one of the league’s marquee events.
“We may see it in Green Bay in future years at some point, where they use Lambeau Field,” he said. “That would actually be a little bit limiting. I don’t know if you could open that up and make it such that there would be hundreds of thousands of people at Lambeau Field. But that’s where this is going.
“It’s become the offseason Super Bowl – the NFL’s Coachella – where cities that wouldn’t be awarded a Super Bowl, like Green Bay, because there aren’t enough hotels and nobody wants to travel to Green Bay in February,” Schefter added. “This has become the NFL’s answer to say, well we’re not going to give you the Super Bowl, but we are gonna give you this draft. And the cities, I believe, love that.”
You could still do the draft in a major stadium with other areas and events in the downtown area it could be in the super dome with events spilling out into the city I think the Washington Mall would be a great venue