NFL Draft 2015: Why is it in Chicago?
By Will Osgood
Answering the question, why is the 2015 NFL Draft in Chicago?
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The simple answer is that New York City’s Radio City Music Hall was already taken for the week in which the NFL was planning to hold this year’s draft. But there’s more to it than that.
The last time the NFL’s annual player selection meeting—aka NFL Draft—was held in Chicago, the event was held at the Sheraton Chicago Hotel. It was not an event per se, certainly not on par with the spectacle it is today.
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In today’s NFL, only the Super Bowl has a greater audience and level of intrigue attached to it. Regular season games do not match the interest leveled by the annual selection meeting. Nor do most playoff games.
The three-day proceedings, as they are now, are more than just a selection meeting, but an all-out party; a Spring celebration of the new American religion—the NFL.
It’s a much different environment, and even process, than the one longtime NFL scout Gil Brandt tells of in his recollections of the 1964 draft in this piece by the Chicago Tribune’s Dan Wiederer. In that draft, Brandt’s Dallas Cowboys waited five hours to make a selection as they awaited results from a doctor on Oregon State cornerback Mel Renfro.
Nowadays, teams are allowed no more than 10 minutes to make a selection, and that much time is allowed in only the first-round, which will be the only round on Thursday’s Day One of the draft.
Rounds 2 and 3 will take place on Friday evening, and rounds 4 through 7 will take much of the day Saturday.
More players will be drafted by NFL franchises over three days than were in 1964 over 14 hours and (basically) one day. But that was before television, before the draft was the draft.
The draft has not been hosted anywhere other than New York City—the city that never sleeps—since 1968. The Big Apple has seen the draft become a marquee event, and certainly not held it back in that sense.
But the NFL felt that the draft should be dispersed, in much the same way its other marquee event, the Super Bowl, is now, by rotating it on a more annual basis. It felt that the draft was now a brand in and of itself, and that it was no longer fair to keep it in one locale each year.
The NFL is known for parity. All its policies—from the salary cap to its scheduling practices—are intended to maintain a sense of parity, or more a sense of keeping every franchise and every NFL city in the loop, to give them hope, to give them an opportunity to reap the rewards of the NFL’s prosperity.
So why Chicago? Why was Chicago the first non-New York City NFL Draft host city since 1968?
The answers are simple. As much as the league pushes for parity and giving hope to moribund franchises, it also maintains a level of practicality. Not every city could host the NFL Draft at least in modern times.
Because it has become such a big event, it is also one that is a logistical nightmare, and consequently it needs to be hosted in a city used to hosting big events. Chicago qualifies along those lines. It has hosted numerous NCAA basketball events for one—and that’s just among nationally-intriguing sports events.
It also needed to be a city large enough to handle a big event, but not so spread out—a la Los Angeles—that getting from one place to another takes a day in and of itself. Chicago, with one of the better public transportation systems and its logical zoning and rectangular street dimensions, make it one of the best transportation cities.
It’s not a stretch to say this city also needed to be one with a proud NFL tradition. Though the Bears have been down on their luck for much of my lifetime (born in December of 1986), few cities in the NFL are as passionate about their NFL team as Bears fans in Chicago.
The NFL and the city settled on Auditorium Theatre of Roosevelt University, which sits in the downtown area of Chicago, almost literally across the street from Lake Michigan, Grant Park and so many of the wonderful tourist attractions in Chicago.
The Auditorium’s events page gives you a flavor of what to expect this week for the draft, including how the NFL is turning the downtown area temporarily into “Draft Town”.
You know we're getting close when...#NFLDraft pic.twitter.com/DGWUPKU0zm
— NFL Network (@nflnetwork) April 28, 2015
Chicago is often known as “The Second City” (New York City being “first”). It only makes sense that as the NFL aims to spread the wealth of hosting the second biggest event on its calendar, it would go to its second largest market.
And then next year?
Well, it turns out New York City could again host the event, if Radio City Music Hall is available. But so could Los Angeles—the other finalist for this draft—or a host of other cities.
When awarding the draft to Chicago, NFL commissioner Roger Goodell stated simply, “We are excited to have fans from throughout the Midwest experience the NFL draft.”
Perhaps next season, fans from another region will get the opportunity as well. For now, we stop here: It seems the NFL made the right decision in giving the draft to the city of Chicago.