Earlier this year the NFL announced what had been widely expected: the 2026 draft will be held in Pittsburgh, PA. Then on Monday the league announced that the 2027 draft would be held in Washington, DC, on the National Mall. Besides being home to storied franchises with strong fanbases, these sites all have something in common with most post-pandemic draft sites:
My theory that the NFL has begun giving the draft mostly to cities that won't ever host a Super Bowl continues.
— Chris Vannini (@ChrisVannini) January 23, 2025
Similar to WWE beginning to send Summerslam to places that won't get WrestleMania. https://t.co/MOxmCpKkFm
Since the pandemic, drafts have been hosted in Cleveland, Las Vegas, Detroit, Kansas City, and Green Bay. Of these, only Las Vegas and Detroit have hosted Super Bowls, and only Las Vegas, which received the 2022 Draft as consolation for losing the 2020 Draft to the pandemic, is likely to host a Super Bowl in the future. Before the pandemic, the 2019 Draft was held in Nashville, and before that, the 2018 Draft was held at Jerryworld in Arlington, whose turn hosting Super Bowl XLV was enough of a disaster to seemingly turn the league off to bringing the Big Game back there. Go back further and you end up at the first three drafts to be held after hitting the road and leaving New York, Chicago twice and Philadelphia once – once again, cities unlikely to hold the Super Bowl anytime soon. Since leaving New York in 2015, no city that has hosted more than two Super Bowls has hosted the Draft.
This greatly clarifies which cities might have a shot at hosting the draft in the future. Cities that are regular Super Bowl hosts are probably very low priorities, but the league will also want to travel to as many different cities as possible before re-using cities. Cities with storied franchises and strong fan bases are also probably high on the list of priorities. And it’s also a good idea to have space for not only the draft stage itself (along with the many people trying to watch), but also for various auxiliary activities surrounding the draft, which can take up many times more space than the actual draft stage. Detroit managed to host the draft in a small, awkwardly shaped space where there’s mostly parking and parks, so the league will find a way if it needs to, but the logistics of it, as well as whether or not the draft can be held near a local landmark or with a picturesque backdrop, will still be factors differentiating cities with similar credentials.
I’ve ranked all 30 NFL cities based on how likely I think they are to host the draft in the near future, based on these factors and others. This is a very approximate ranking and shouldn’t be taken to point to who I think will host the 2028 Draft or any other particular future draft. Rather, these are the sites that I think are worth watching and which I think the league will go to in the future. (This post took long enough to put together that it cut into the time I have to put together a mock schedule for this season, so I hope it’s worth it.) Without further ado, let us begin.
30: Jacksonville
This is something of a joke ranking; realistically Jacksonville should be significantly higher, but even the reasons why they should be more worthy of consideration could be considered reasons not to go with them. For example, they aren’t likely to host another Super Bowl, but that’s because Super Bowl XXXIX was a bit of a disaster logistically, and unlike Dallas I don’t get the sense that’s improved. Add to that the small size of the market and it being more concerned with college football than the pros, not being a particularly storied franchise, and not having any real landmarks, and I’d be very surprised if the draft visited Jacksonville any time soon.
29: Dallas
28: Las Vegas
27: Detroit
Cities that have hosted both Super Bowls and the draft. Hosting the draft means the league would want to wait a long time before coming back anyway; hosting the Super Bowl, especially with a shot at hosting again in the future, means you’re not likely to be the sort of market the league is looking for. Despite Dallas’ struggles hosting Super Bowl XLV, my impression is that the accommodations around AT&T Stadium have improved since then, and Jerry Jones is a powerful enough owner that if he wants to host another Super Bowl, he’ll get it eventually (though how much longer he’s going to be the active owner of the Cowboys is an open question). Vegas also seems like a city that could be worked into the regular Super Bowl rotation, and while the draft they hosted was largely because of its status as a tourist destination with picturesque landmarks, it was also to boost the following of the Raiders, who had yet to play a game in the city when the 2020 Draft would have been held there. Detroit might not seem like a target to host the Super Bowl in the future unless they get a new stadium, but they have hosted two in the past.
26. Tampa Bay
25. Phoenix/Arizona
24. Atlanta
23. Houston
Cities that have hosted three or more Super Bowls with no real compelling reason to hold the draft there despite that. Most of them are lukewarm to professional sports for various reasons, whether having lots of retirees and expatriates in Tampa and Phoenix, or being more concerned about college football in Atlanta, Houston, and arguably Tampa again. Those factors also apply to the cities that have hosted the most Super Bowls, but these cities also don’t have much in the way of landmarks or picturesque backdrops to overcome that. The one city I may be underrating is Houston, which has hosted three Super Bowls with long gaps between them, and which does have a decent-sized fan base that unfortunately has to deal with being in the Cowboys’ shadow and having the newest team in the league because their old team was ripped away from them. But Houston doesn’t have much in the way of landmarks and may just hold the draft in the complex that NRG Stadium is part of, if they were asked to hold it.
22. Washington
21. Pittsburgh
20. Green Bay
19. Kansas City
18. Cleveland
17. Nashville
Cities that have hosted (or will host) the NFL Draft recently and would likely be expected to wait their turn before hosting again.
16. Miami
15. Los Angeles
14. New Orleans
These are the three cities that have hosted the most Super Bowls, but if the league runs out of cities that aren’t likely to host the Super Bowl, there are reasons to go to them. Miami is a known tourist destination with plenty of landmarks, although it’s not a strong pro sports town and there might not be an ideal space to hold the draft. The sheer size of the Los Angeles market could make it awfully compelling, and the league may want to juice the lukewarm fandom for the local teams there by holding the draft on Hollywood Boulevard, outside SoFi Stadium, or at Exposition Park, but the spectacle of the crowd cheering for the Raiders harder than their own ostensible home teams might be an embarrassment the league wants to avoid.
Of the cities that regularly appear in the Super Bowl rotation, New Orleans may be the most interesting candidate to host the draft as well. While most regular Super Bowl hosts are rather lukewarm towards their local NFL teams, New Orleans has perhaps the strongest fan base for any NFL team in the south outside Dallas, despite the presence of one of college football’s most storied programs an hour away in Baton Rouge, helped by the ties binding the Saints to the community after Hurricane Katrina and the years of success in the Payton-Brees era. Plus, the French Quarter is a world-renowned tourist attraction, and the idea of holding the draft there is intriguing, although potentially difficult.
13. Philadelphia
12. Chicago
These were the first two cities to hold the draft after the NFL took it on the road, and their size and fanatical devotion to their respective teams could make them strong candidates to jump the line and host again. I put Chicago ahead of Philly even though they hosted two drafts at the start of this run because of the size not just of the market in general, but of the Bears’ fanbase in particular – probably the largest fanbase for any team within its home market.
11. San Francisco
The Bay Area is set to host its third Super Bowl next year, but that’s actually kind of surprising. The Bay Area isn’t the sort of warm-weather Sun Belt city you associate with being a key part of the Super Bowl rotation, and their hosting of Super Bowl 50 was partly a pun for the big game’s “golden” anniversary to be held in the Golden State a stone’s throw from the Golden Gate Bridge. While Levi’s Stadium is now set to host its second Super Bowl, the only other market to host three or more Super Bowls that hasn’t had a gap of less than ten years between any two of them is Houston. The 49ers have a strong fan base dating back to the Bill Walsh era, and no shortage of picturesque places to host the draft – at Golden Gate Park overlooking the Pacific Ocean, perhaps, or at the Presidio in the shadow of the Golden Gate Bridge, or at any number of places along the waterfront.
10. New York
As we enter the top ten, we start to hit the cities that feel like real contenders to host the draft, like these are the cities that, in some order, are likely to host the next ten drafts to be awarded. As such I’ll include maps of where I think they might be held. New York is, of course, the city that already hosted the draft for many years before the league decided to take it on the road, but those were at places like the Javits Center and Radio City Music Hall, not the vast, open spaces the league has held the draft at since. The Big Apple is somewhat lukewarm towards its NFL teams, but not as much as markets like Los Angeles, and the sheer size of the market means that the Jets and especially Giants have two of the larger fanbases in the league, big and committed enough that, by the time 20-25 years have passed since the last draft in the city, it’ll feel like they should have their turn to experience the draft locally, and the sheer size of the market may effectively represent an offer the league can’t refuse – especially considering New York might be able to put on the biggest draft ever.
I considered the possibility of holding the draft in Times Square, but the draft stage alone would probably have to take up at least the full length of a city block without even considering the larger “draft experience” that would have to take up space on the surrounding streets. No, for what the NFL Draft has become we have to think bigger – much bigger, like “the draft taking over Central Park” bigger. The National Mall spans over 300 acres, which can fit a lot of people, but Central Park covers nearly 850 acres, potentially allowing for a million or even two million people in its confines – depending on how much space the league and park are willing to take up between all the trees. On the map I’ve identified three places within Central Park alone where a draft stage could potentially be placed; the North Meadow would offer the most potential viewing area at about 17 acres, but the others are closer to the hustle and bustle of Midtown. And these assume the league wouldn’t want to cover up the various lakes within the park.
Another possibility is that New Jersey politicians could be insistent on holding the draft on their side of the Hudson, at the Meadowlands. One intriguing possibility in that case would be holding the draft stage at the Meadowlands Racecourse and taking over the track infield.
9. Boston/New England
So far Kansas City is the only market to host the draft that was home to an AFL franchise in that league’s heyday, and it was the logical place to hold the first draft in an AFL city as the home to Lamar Hunt’s Chiefs, the team that practically founded the AFL. So at one point I was going to assign the next several spots to the remaining original AFL cities, but I now think the league may go to another AFL city pretty soon. Still, I am giving the next two spots to AFL cities, and in this case, despite the Brady-Belichick dynasty and the size of the market, New England has a couple other things going against it. First, I’m not sure how fond the other owners are of Robert Kraft; second, there’s a reason it took until the days of the AFL for pro football to stick in a market of Boston’s size, and a reason why the team plays its games well outside Boston proper in Foxborough, almost equidistant between Boston and Providence, Rhode Island. Boston is a heavily built-up area with not a lot of room for anything, and while the presence of various colleges meant that earlier Boston teams could play in places like Harvard Stadium or even Fenway Park, those places never worked very well.
Of course, while there may not be room for an NFL stadium and everything around it in Boston, that doesn’t mean there isn’t room for the draft. The most obvious place to put the draft would be at Boston Common, with enough space on the side along Charles Street for about 6.5 acres of viewing space. You could also put the draft stage in the nearby Public Garden and have fans stretch out down Commonwealth Avenue the way they stretched down Broadway at the draft in Nashville, though that wouldn’t be an ideal solution, between the actual garden and the statue of George Washington you’d have to work around; setting up shop in front of the garden may be more practical. Finally, there’s always setting up shop in the Gillette Stadium parking lots.
8. Denver
There have long been rumors that Denver is interested in holding the draft, but the altitude that does so much to affect actual sporting events in the city might also be an impediment to drawing hundreds of thousands of fans, not to mention over a dozen prospects, there, despite Denver having lots of flights as a United hub. There also doesn’t seem to be much of an obvious place to hold the draft; there’s not much open space downtown, the city’s largest park (and seemingly the only one with a Wikipedia article) City Park doesn’t have a lot of uninterrupted open space without trees in the way (it might actually be easier to set up shop on the golf course across the street), and even the parking lots around Mile High Stadium are on the small side with the stadium itself fairly centrally located among them. I tried to identify the largest lot, but it still resulted in only about five acres of space outside the theater itself – and the outer ring of parking lots (D and G) are actually on a higher altitude, so it may not be practical to have a draft staging area that spans both higher and lower lots. The best place to go might actually be inside the stadium like the league did in Arlington, and I suspect there’s a reason they didn’t go that route in Green Bay.
But I may actually be underrating Denver here, and not just because they seem to have as much scuttlebutt around their interest than any other city, to the point of reportedly having actively bid for the 2026 and 2027 drafts, perhaps the only city to do so not to win one of them. Realistically, they probably should be at least sixth, ahead of the next two cities, though I have a hard time putting them higher because of what other cities have going for them. I may be playing up the importance of the altitude more than the league would, and even the limited space they have to offer is still better than many if not most of the cities I have above them.
7. Charlotte
For example, at least Mile High Stadium has parking lots; Bank of America Stadium doesn’t seem to have any visible exterior lots as far as I can tell. (Realistically, I think the main reason I kept Denver at 8 was to set up this segue.)
Charlotte has been engaged in active conversations about the possibility of holding the draft, and while the Panthers are one of the youngest franchises in the NFL they’ve developed an interesting history and distinct identity in just over a quarter century of existence. But boy, is it hard for me to figure out where they might hold it. Charlotte’s “uptown” doesn’t have much more in the way of large open spaces, especially as the area’s economy has boomed, and the stadium is pretty much right next to it. There are parks in the area but they rarely take up more than a city block, and even Detroit managed to squeeze in its draft facilities across existing open spaces. And I don’t get the sense that the NFL wants to stray too far from a city’s downtown; Arlington might be the farthest they’ve gone.
But the conditions in Uptown are constrained enough that I decided to think outside the box and make the trek out to Charlotte Motor Speedway; after all, Charlotte is home to the NASCAR Hall of Fame, even if it is back in Uptown. Just the spot where I’ve placed the draft stage allows for 16 acres for fans to fill up the infield outside the main theater, without even filling up the whole go-kart course, and there’s a much wider area to hold auxiliary activities. The problem is that it’s so far away from Charlotte proper, let alone Uptown; nearly a 20-mile drive from the heart of the city. Would the NFL be up for that?
6. Cincinnati
Cincinnati is another city with a strong fanbase dating back to the AFL days, and has expressed interest in hosting the draft in the past, with the city’s mayor saying last month that the city is “putting together a team” to make a pitch for the draft. But it’s still a relatively small market without a lot of experience in handling big events. In addition, Paul Brown Stadium isn’t much better in terms of parking than Charlotte would be, with small parking lots broken up by roads and freeways. Luckily Cincinnati has other usable public spaces; perhaps the best one near downtown might be Union Terminal with its large, semi-wide approach. I’ve placed the draft stage in front of the fountain in front of the building, forcing it to sit partly on top of the grassy median on the approach road, but it might be better to set the stage behind the fountain and incorporate Union Terminal itself as the green room, if the fountain wouldn’t be too much in the way.
5. Indianapolis
The Colts are certainly a storied franchise, and even have some important history in its current home (if only because of one Peyton Manning), but I’m not sure the team has quite the depth of roots here than the cities in the top four, even if it’s technically been here longer than one of them. Couple that with its relatively small market size and I doubt it’s a high priority. Another point against Indy is that the area has already been important to the draft process for nearly 40 years as the host of the Scouting Combine… but a point in its favor is that the NFL may soon (as early as 2027) move the Combine out of Indy and take it on the road like the Draft, and may want to give Indy a draft as consolation.
Certainly Indy has a reputation for being able to stage big events that belies its size, but while there are a couple of compelling options for where to stage the draft, any of them would have significant problems. To get this out of the way first, Lucas Oil Stadium has some parking but not a lot. But it actually might be a wash compared to the American Legion Mall stretching south from the main library to the Indiana War Memorial and US District Court. It’s a wide green space with few trees, not dissimilar to the space south of Kansas City’s Union Station when that place hosted the draft, but regularly interrupted by things like flagpoles and an obelisk right smack-dab in the center, which would make a draft stage at either the library or the memorial a tight fit. And then you consider why those things are there and you realize that locals might consider holding something as tawdry as the draft there at least as disrespectful as I wondered about the National Mall.
So I went with Indianapolis Motor Speedway, which is significantly closer to downtown than Charlotte’s is, but still poses some problems. I really wanted the draft stage to straddle the “yard of bricks”, but the NFL seems to have a minimum width for the draft stage of 200 feet, and even stretching from the outer wall to the front of the pagoda comes out to only about 175-185. The “pagoda plaza” stretching from the other side of the pagoda is narrower than that, at least if we want to avoid the landscaping. So I ended up going with some of the infield parking lots, but the infield at IMS is still pretty cluttered, even including a few holes of an adjacent golf course. I’ve identified 13 acres of viewing area, but only by allowing it to stretch back over a third of a mile.
4. Baltimore
I could have seen any of the top four (three before allowing the remaining AFL city to become an interloper) taking the top spot before I actually started investigating in depth. Most of the cities the NFL has gone to in recent years have very strong, deep-rooted fanbases, and these cities (plus Cincinnati) stand out in that category more than the other contenders. Baltimore has a lot of history with the NFL going back to when the Colts were in town and had Johnny Unitas (the only other markets to have had teams in the NFL prior to the foundation of the AFL, but haven’t hosted the draft this millennium, are in California), not to mention a die-hard, working-class fanbase that kept the torch alive after the Colts left, to the point the Colts’ marching band stuck around, separately from the team, to eventually glom on to the Ravens. Just this week it was reported that the area is exploring a bid to host in 2029, 2030, or 2031. But it’s the second-smallest market of the four, about the same size as Indy, is probably out of the running for 2028 just because of how close it is to Washington, and I initially had a pretty hard time finding a good spot to hold the draft in. M&T Bank Stadium has decent-sized parking lots, maybe more than the next two, but they’re shared with the Orioles and, more importantly, are broken up by freeway ramps and overpasses.
The area around the Inner Harbor should work – there are a number of plaza spaces, plus most of the buildings on the north side of Pratt Street are set back enough to create another plaza-type space – but a lot of them are more constrained than I’d like or have a bunch of trees in the way, unless the league wants to set up an artificial platform in the harbor itself. I ended up setting up shop at Rash Field Park on the south side of the Inner Harbor and hoping that the Pride of Baltimore Memorial, which is just a ship’s mast, could be incorporated into the draft theater, but that’s a big assumption and the result is only about three acres of viewing space outside the theater itself. If the league were to set up here it might be at the other end of the park, letting the memorial frame the draft area rather than obstruct it. Fort McHenry, which I seem to recall being involved in the festivities the last time the Ravens won the Super Bowl, could also work, though I’m not sure there’s enough space of the right shape to work. Where there might be the most space is at the south end of the Baltimore Peninsula near the Hanover Street Bridge, if the league is willing to go further out of the way to a spot that isn’t necessarily a landmark.
Given all that, why do I have this in front of Indianapolis and Cincinnati? Well, I’d say it’s a combination of the fact that the Inner Harbor is a relatively well-known landmark, the depth of the city’s NFL fandom, the long history the city has with the league, and the Ravens’ current relative success. The timing of when Indy might get chosen might have little to do with how good an option it is relative to the remaining alternatives and more to do with when the Combine leaves town. Then, if it comes down to Baltimore and Cincinnati, I think the league goes with the franchise that’s been more successful recently in a city with more iconic landmarks that’s more well-known, at least among people on the East Coast, even if the image these days isn’t that great. (Detroit and Cleveland don’t have great images but that hasn’t stopped the league from holding drafts in those cities.)
3. Seattle
I’m obviously biased, but I do think Seattle has a lot of what the league is looking for in a draft host. I feel like you might not normally think of it as a strong football town, what with it being full of coffee-sipping computer nerds, but this is the home of the franchise associated with the “12th Man” in pro football. Add to that that it’s the largest market in the top eight and I imagine it has to be high on the league’s radar, and I’ve ranked it as high as I have despite city leaders seemingly having tepid interest; I only really found one link talking about it, at least recently, and that as part of a larger interview.
The problem is that there’s not a lot of space, in more ways than one; when I looked for discussions of Seattle’s prospects of holding the draft, the lack of hotel rooms was cited as an obstacle. (Obviously Green Bay doesn’t have a lot of hotel rooms, but I got the sense that it housed a number of visiting fans in locals’ homes.) Regarding an actual spot to hold the draft, there’s a grand total of one surface parking lot associated with Lumen Field, on the north side of the stadium, and its dimensions are such that you’d have to orient the draft stage perpendicular to the stadium and not have a lot of space for anyone that can’t fit in the draft theater. The next obvious option would be Seattle Center, the former World’s Fair grounds on the north end of downtown anchored by the Space Needle, but there are actually a lot of buildings there resulting in more limited space, and there’s no way to guarantee that you aren’t holding the draft right next to a playoff game for the Kraken (or the Sonics, once they come back) at Climate Pledge Arena. There is room for it in front of the arena and International Fountain if you’re able to use the Fisher Pavilion building as the green room, but as with my suggestion for Baltimore, the result is only three acres of viewing space outside the draft stage itself. You might be better off setting up shop at Memorial Stadium, the high school stadium on the east side of the Center.
Is there anywhere else you could go? Seattle’s other well-known landmark, Pike Place Market, doesn’t have any open space nearby. Seattle does have an extensive parks system, some of which might have enough uninterrupted space to host the draft if the NFL considers them flat enough, though the ones that stand out to me, Discovery and Magnuson Parks, are further from downtown. Discovery might be doable despite not being a well-known landmark just for the view of the Olympic Peninsula, since Seattle is known for its scenery as much as anything else. I almost wonder if you could take over some of the port facilities, or maybe the long stretch of empty space on the west side of 1st Ave S near Lumen Field (which is probably only wide enough if you close 1st Ave S itself).
2. Minnesota
With Washington hosting in 2027, Minnesota is now the only market in the league’s two most iconic divisions, the NFC East and North, that has not yet hosted the draft this millennium – and it’s certainly had a strong fanbase that’s stuck with the team through decades of heartbreak. Vikings fans have been wondering if and when the draft would come to town almost since it hit the road, with one area reporter even implying that Vikings officials themselves are thinking “it’s our turn” while targeting 2029 to host. If I had to guess, the biggest reason it hasn’t hosted already – or at least the biggest reason it wouldn’t host in the near future – is that it hosted the Super Bowl somewhat recently, and US Bank Stadium was built with a fixed roof in large part in hopes of hosting more big events like that, but the NFL tends to go to cold-weather cities for the Super Bowl, even when the stadiums are domed, only about once a decade or so, and there shouldn’t be any reason the Twin Cities’ Super Bowl-hosting past should be any more of an impediment than it was for Detroit.
Minneapolis does not have much in the way of landmarks – unless you count the Mall of America – or open space, and I initially thought US Bank Stadium didn’t have any more surface parking than in Charlotte; it does have some on the northeast side of the stadium, but it might not be possible to use it without closing Third Street or the railroad tracks next to the stadium, and as in Seattle there’s not much room for spectators outside the theater. (There’s also a little lot at the southeast corner of the stadium, but it’s basically just taking advantage of unused space in the stadium footprint.) It does have a park called the Commons adjacent to it leading northwest towards downtown, but there’s a rail station for the stadium directly in between the park and the stadium. There might be just enough space to squeeze in a draft stage in the plaza northwest of the stadium between Park Ave, the train station, and other obstructions, but it would be an awkward fit for any spectators outside the main draft theater.
That’s become something of a theme in the top ten. The candidate cities that would seem the most ideal for the league on paper don’t have any obvious spots to hold the draft on par with where the other recent hosts have held it, with many of their stadiums lacking in surface parking. Those cities that do have suitable places to hold the draft also have reasons for the NFL to hold off on going there. With the selection of Pittsburgh and Washington, the league seems to have just about exhausted all the most obvious candidates for draft cities that have the best combination of both. Are there any good options left?
1. Buffalo
I always thought that, if I was wrong about any original AFL city being forced to wait until going through the others in the top eight, it’s probably this one, just because of what the Bills mean to the city of Buffalo. Even then my perception might be skewed by how good the Bills are now; I never thought much about the Bills back in the days when they were just another team for the Patriots to beat up on twice a year. But what convinced me to put it in the top spot is that it seems to be the odds-on favorite to host in 2028, in conjunction with the new stadium opening next year, to the point that most of the other cities seem to be focusing on 2029. (Though Bills COO Pete Guelli recently suggested 2029 was more realistic given “all the work we need to do”.)
It looks like the new stadium will not only keep all the parking associated with the existing stadium, while adding new parking butting up against the nearby community college (and incorporating some of the community college parking into its own), but the footprint of the existing stadium will be converted into more parking. That makes me wonder if the site of the existing stadium would be a good spot to put the draft stage (especially since the lot there appears to be designed to be oriented towards the new stadium) – the place where so many existing memories have been and (fans hope) will be made becoming the place where new memories begin for the Bills and 31 other NFL teams. That would make 2028 the ideal timing as well, as the old stadium will be torn down only a month before the 2027 draft, meaning it would have been a tight fit to get a draft stage set up in that space. This recent article about Buffalo’s interest suggests a few other places the draft could be held, but most of them would be tight fits except for the waterfront, which might not be as impressive as the league would like.
The league certainly has no shortage of interested bidders to hold the draft for the rest of this decade and beyond, to the point some of the bidders may have to prepare for a longer wait than they’re expecting (and I’m not holding my breath for Seattle to host before 2032). But as it runs through the candidates it may have to get more creative with how each draft is held, and by the mid-to-late 2030s it may have to start thinking about what sort of cities it wants to go to going forward.