The NFL Draft has gone from a meeting in a hotel room behind closed doors to the Fountains of Bellagio in one of the more quiet changes in American sports history. It was quiet until Las Vegas got a hold of it.
It doesn’t happen at all in one version of this story. When ESPN asked Pete Rozelle, who was commissioner at the time, about showing the draft on TV in 1980, he reportedly said only one word: “Why?” He didn’t understand why anyone would want to watch some people on the team read names off a list. He agreed anyway, maybe just to be polite. No one in that room could have known how important that small choice would be for the league’s long-term culturalimpact.
The draft had been exactly what Rozelle thought it was for almost 50 years: a boring, practical process held in hotel conference rooms near the NFL’s New York headquarters. There were no crowds, shows, or ceremonies that were worth talking about. It was paperwork on a stage. Fans began to show up without being invited and gather in large groups outside of Radio City Music Hall. This caused a different kind of problem for the league. “We just outgrew them,” Eric Finkelstein, the NFL’s senior director of event operations, has said of the New York venues. Even though he’s done 23 drafts, he still sounds a little surprised by how big it all got. He is adamant that the growth wasn’t planned from the top down. It was a response. The league kept growing because more and more fans kept coming, until it made the most sense to take it all on the road.
Nashville was the best place to be before Vegas. In 2019, 600,000 people came to downtown Tennessee over three days. That’s a huge crowd for an event where the main thing to do is watch a commissioner read names. But that number really does show what the draft was like at that point. Anything but the picks was important no longer. It was running along with the NFL Experience, with 40-yard dashes, Super Bowl ring displays, and the unique energy of having all 32 fan bases in one place at the same time, each bringing their own mix of hope and disappointment to the crowd.
When it was finally its turn, Las Vegas brought something that other cities just couldn’t make. The 2020 draft was supposed to happen there before the pandemic turned it into a surreal virtual version that made its own magic. The Strip already makes money by putting on shows. It already believes that bigger is better, so it doesn’t need to be persuaded. The main event took place at Caesars Forum, and three Linq parking lots were turned into festival grounds. There were also attractions all the way to the Bellagio fountains. For example, on night two, illusionist Criss Angel performed in a straitjacket, which is something that Nashville could not have provided. The event had more than 70 Vegas residency acts.
Roger Goodell, the NFL commissioner, made it sound like it was about more than football. He said it was the biggest coming-out party in sports. It was a real get-together after years of COVID problems, venues that were only half full, and getting tired of seeing live events get smaller. He might have been exaggerating—commissioners often do—but he wasn’t completely wrong either. For some reason, the Las Vegas draft made me feel like I could stop being afraid of big crowds again.
President of the Las Vegas Visitors and Convention Authority Steve Hill said that 300,000 people would come from outside the city alone. When you add in locals and spread it out over three days, Nashville’s record was always going to go down. It’s free to go to the draft, which changes the math in important ways. There is no barrier because there is no ticket price. This means that the crowd is mostly made up of people who came because they wanted to, not because they had already paid.
In 1980, Rozelle didn’t see that the draft sells something unique that is hard to copy. Every team is taking part. Every group of fans has something to gain or lose. Of all the games in a league, this is the only one where, at least on paper, the losing teams are on the same level as the winning ones. It’s not often that you can offer something like that, but Las Vegas is great at putting strange things in packages.
