As you watch the NFL draft this week and see the massive crowds in downtown Kansas City, Missouri, you might wonder what the event would look like in New Orleans.
More importantly, you might wonder why it has never come to New Orleans.
The NFL draft and New Orleans make too much sense: The city with the most passionate football fans in the U.S., and the event which spurs the most widespread pigskin passion in the sport. It's a marriage made in Who Dat heaven.
And unfortunately, it's unlikely to happen.
“Something would have to give,” is how Jay Cicero, the president of the Greater New Orleans Sports Foundation, put it.
Simply put, New Orleans is busy in late April when the NFL draft traditionally happens. Like, packed-to-the-gills busy.
The draft's traditional date on the last weekend in April coincides with one of the busiest weekends on the New Orleans social calendar. It's the opening weekend of Jazz Fest, which annually attracts hundreds of thousands of revelers to the city. It's also usually the same week as the Zurich Classic, the local stop on the PGA Tour, this year being the rare exception.
Those events tax the city's hotel inventory and service industry on their own. Adding the NFL draft to the mix, especially as it exists today, would simply overwhelm the infrastructure.
Consequently, the New Orleans Saints and GNOSF, the two entities that would spearhead any effort to lure the draft to the city, have never submitted a bid for the event.
“It's been determined it's not feasible with it being the same weekend as Jazz Fest,” Cicero said. “If we were empty on that weekend, it would be maybe a different situation for us. We'd probably look very hard at it. But we're not.”
Saints and NFL officials have discussed bringing the draft to New Orleans, but for now, it's gone no further than that, said Greg Bensel, the Saints' executive vice president of communications.
“(The NFL) would love New Orleans as a site,” Bensel said. “(But) our event calendar makes it particularly tough for us to host an event like the draft. If the calendar lined up and (the dates became) available, we would aggressively pursue it.”
There's also a less conspicuous reason the draft hasn't been here. The NFL has started to use the event as something of a consolation prize for cities that are not in the regular rotation to host Super Bowls.
It's no coincidence that the markets that have hosted the draft since 2015 when the NFL began taking it on the road have largely been "non-Super Bowl" cities: Chicago (2015-2016); Philadelphia (2017); Arlington, Texas (2018); Nashville, Tennessee (2019); Cleveland (2021); and Las Vegas (2022). The 2024 draft has been awarded to Detroit, which beat out Green Bay, Wisconsin, and Washington.
The timing of the draft in late April makes it more suitable for the league's cold-weather markets than Super Bowls, and NFL officials want to reward those markets that often have been neglected for Super Bowls.
“Given our position as a traditional host of Super Bowls (who will continue to be in rotation). it would be difficult for the NFL to award the event to us, even if the calendar allowed, despite the many advantages New Orleans provides,” Bensel said.
The NFL draft is a different beast than the low-profile event that started in a hotel ballroom in 1936. Back then, only league executives attended the draft and player selections were recorded on a chalkboard.
The modern NFL draft mushroomed into Goliath after ESPN started broadcasting the event in 1980. Today, the draft draws millions of TV viewers, outdrawing some other sports’ championship events.
The draft went to another level when the league, after having anchored the event for 50 years in New York, began moving it among its team cities in 2015.
This week, more than 100,000 fans are expected to attend the draft in Kansas City, which will stage the event at historic the city's historic Union Station. Last year, the draft drew an estimated 300,000 fans over three days in Las Vegas. In 2019, an estimated 600,000 fans attended the draft in Nashville, where officials reported an economic impact of $224 million from the three-day event.
The competition among NFL cities to host the draft has been intense. The league bids out the draft just as it does all its special events, requiring cities to submit an application of interest — a step New Orleans has yet to take.
“It's been in our conversations, but we would have to compromise our other local events to do it, and that's not something anyone is interested in doing,” Cicero said.
Things could always change to alleviate the logjam.
The NFL, in its continual quest to dominate the offseason news cycle, could move back the draft a week or two on the calendar.
The PGA Tour reportedly is considering changes to its schedule as it grapples with the challenge of the rival LIV Golf Tour, but Zurich Classic officials have made it known they prefer to stay where they are on the calendar, two weeks after the Masters.
So, for now, the NFL draft remains a "no-go" for New Orleans.
That dream of seeing Jon Rahm, Mel Kiper and Trombone Shorty in the same weekend will have to wait.
