In his decades-long reign as the NFL draft’s foremost guru, Mel Kiper Jr. has had his share of hits and misses. He rated future Hall of Famer Peyton Manning higher than Ryan Leaf in 1998 (not everyone can say the same), but the top overall prospect on Kiper’s famed “Big Board” that year was Andre Wadsworth, a defensive end from Florida State who was out of the league after three seasons. Kiper gave a first-round grade to a live-armed quarterback named Brett Favre in 1991 (the future three-time MVP ultimately fell to round two), but Kiper was also very high on Notre Dame’s Jimmy Clausen in 2010. “If Jimmy Clausen is not a successful quarterback in the NFL, I’m done,” Kiper said at the time. “That’s it. I’m out.” Clausen finished his career with just seven touchdowns in 14 starts. 

Kiper, meanwhile, is now in his 40th year as ESPN’s marquee draft analyst. He’s forgiven for the misappraisal, which in his chosen vocation is less a job hazard than an inevitability. To work the draft—whether as a pundit like Kiper, or an actual general manager for a team—is to invite the opportunity to be proven spectacularly wrong. One prediction Kiper undoubtedly got right is how the NFL draft would become appointment-viewing for football fans. “That’s one thing I was right about,” Kiper told me ahead of this week’s event. “You miss on players. But the one thing I was right on, when I was a kid at 15, 16, 17 years of age, I knew how big this was going to be. I had a vision of how big this was going to be.”

This year’s NFL draft will kick off Thursday in downtown Kansas City, where hundreds of thousands are expected to be on hand for a three-day event that will include a red carpet, celebrity cameos, and musical performances—most notably, Machine Gun Kelly and Rick Ross will hit the stage at Friday night’s “Kelce Jam,” hosted by reigning Super Bowl champion Travis Kelce. Millions more will watch on television, as the draft now represents a tentpole event for ESPN and yet another testament to the NFL’s unrelenting popularity in the United States. ESPN is pulling out all the stops, promising more than 30 hours of programming on its signature channel, ABC—which is also owned by the Walt Disney Company—as well as its radio, digital, and social platforms. The network is dispatching a small army of hosts, commentators, and reporters to Kansas City to cover the festivities, including Adam Schefter, Suzy Kolber, Mike Greenberg, and Mina Kimes. 

The hype is already in full swing on air, with frequent segments sizing up this year’s prospects, along with others revisiting iconic moments from drafts past. “Who loves the NFL draft? America, that’s who,” Jeremy Schaap declared in one such segment on Sunday. The draft has “drama, suspense, the unexpected,” Schaap said, along with “moments that cover the full spectrum of human emotion: humor, sadness, elation, and everything in between.” ESPN plans to shift to “wall-to-wall coverage” on Thursday afternoon, with the picks starting to roll out in prime-time telecasts that night and coverage continuing for two more days. 

The television coverage is the most high-profile component of a year-round content industry dedicated to the draft. Sports media is now awash in mock drafts and detailed scouting reports of college football prospects, but in the late 1970s and early 1980s, Kiper had the market cornered. He began scouting and analyzing prospects as a teenager growing up in Baltimore, starting his own draft-report service in 1978. He would do as many as 25 interviews a day back then, breaking down the draft on radio shows across the country. As soon as the interviews wrapped, Kiper said his phone lines were ringing off the hook with calls from people looking to order his draft reports. Since joining ESPN in 1983, his pompadour hair and frenetic delivery are now synonymous with the event, as is his unrivaled ability to break down every prospect—from the top-ranked quarterback to the fourth-best center. 

Kiper saw the draft burst out of smoke-filled hotel ballrooms and move into glitzier New York venues like Madison Square Garden and Radio City Music Hall. And he has remained in his role as the draft evolved into something that more closely resembles Coachella. “I knew there was interest way, way, way back in this whole draft process,” Kiper said. “People couldn’t get enough of this.”

If Kiper is the patron saint of mock drafts, the founding father of the draft broadcast is Chet Simmons, ESPN’s first president. Simmons, like Kiper, saw potential in the proceeding, which was better known then as the “annual player selection meeting.” 

“He had this crazy idea that the draft would be good television,” former ESPN chairman Steve Bornstein said of Simmons, who died in 2010. When Simmons pitched the idea of showing the draft on his fledgling network, then NFL commissioner Pete Rozelle was initially dubious, famously likening the idea to reading the Manhattan phone book on television. Bornstein, a junior programmer for ESPN at the time, was at that meeting in early 1980 at the league’s office on Park Avenue. 

“Commissioner Rozelle laughed. He thought it was the funniest thing in the world,” Bornstein recalled. “As far as he was concerned, it was nothing more than a glorified press conference, and at that time, people typically didn’t televise press conferences.” Rozelle didn’t need much arm-twisting. He oversaw a major expansion of the league’s television coverage during his tenure as commissioner, most notably the creation of Monday Night Football. If anyone was going to be receptive to Simmons’s peculiar proposal, it was going to be Rozelle. The league’s owners, on the other hand, were not on board. “They didn’t want the draft to be televised,” Kiper said. “They thought it would be embarrassing to the league to just televise names being announced.” The owners unanimously rejected the proposal, but Rozelle wouldn’t take no for an answer.  

On April 29, 1980, a little more than seven months after it launched, ESPN aired the NFL draft for the first time. For a network still in its infancy, the draft served a practical function. “We were filling time,” Bornstein said. “We were trying to program 24 hours a day with sports with a very thin library of material. Any time you could fill up programming hours, that was a good idea. If you were filling it up with the number one sport in America, the National Football League, that’s an even better idea.”  

Chris Berman, who had anchored ESPN’s draft coverage for more than 30 years, recalled in a phone interview how his first draft assignment came in 1981, when he reported live from a now shuttered Manhattan restaurant called Mike Manuche’s, described on ESPN’s broadcast as “one of the traditional football watering holes in New York City.”

“Most of the people eating there probably had no idea why we were there,” Berman told me. “They were the regular New York business lunch crowd.” Berman’s enduring memory from that draft is the lights going off while he was on air discussing his beloved New York Jets, the restaurant’s power supply succumbing to the demands of the TV truck. “I remember that to this day, like, ‘Oh, my God, the power of the draft,’” Berman said.  

ESPN’s presentation grew more professional, and Berman eventually anchored the network’s draft coverage beginning in 1987. In that time, he recognized that the draft was really a fix for the deprived fan. “Here’s what I realized just a few years in: for the pro football fan, certainly in the ’80s, the draft was like an oasis in the middle of a late-January to late-July desert,” Berman said. “That was when I realized, ‘Ah, so this is why it’s going to work.’”

The NFL’s offseason calendar is more crowded these days, as the league has turned events like the scouting combine and schedule release into annual milestones. But the draft remains the feature presentation between the Super Bowl and the start of training camp. And as the NFL swelled into an even larger cultural force in the ’90s and 21st century, the draft likewise became a bigger draw. In 1995, the league moved it from the Marriott Marquis in Times Square to the theater at Madison Square Garden, which served as its venue for the next 10 years. After a one-year stint at the Javits Center in 2005, the draft ushered in a new era at Radio City Music Hall, where it was held from 2006 until 2014. 

A scheduling conflict pushed the draft out of Radio City in 2015, as the Rockettes planned to hold a spring show at the venue that year. The show was ultimately postponed, but the NFL took the draft on the road, holding it in Chicago for the next two years. It marked the beginning of the draft’s latest iteration, with the event now being held outdoors and drawing throngs of fans to a new host city each year. The 2019 NFL draft in downtown Nashville had 600,000 spectators over three days and featured an appearance from Taylor Swift, who used the platform to announce a new single. That festival atmosphere “translates in the broadcast” of the draft, according to Peter O’Reilly, the executive vice president of NFL events.

“People were flipping by that and it looked like New Year’s Eve,” O’Reilly said. “Even if you weren’t hanging on every pick in the second round on Friday night, you flip by and see 200,000 people on the streets of Nashville, that environment, that energy, that passion comes through in the broadcast.” 

This year’s draft in Kansas City, where locals are still basking in the Chiefs’ second Super Bowl title in four years, is expected to see as many as 350,000 gather over the next three days. It will be a precursor to 2026, when Kansas City will be one of 16 cities across North America to host matches at the World Cup, and some believe the draft could set a high bar. “We keep talking about the World Cup,” Chiefs president Mark Donovan said earlier this year. “The draft will be the largest event the city has ever hosted.”

The draft’s move to grander venues coincided with its evolution into a bigger media spectacle. There will be more than 1,800 members of the press on site for this year’s draft, double the number from 2010.  

In 2006, NFL Network aired the draft in addition to ESPN, and it’s been a multi-channel broadcast ever since. Four years later, the NFL began showing the first round of the draft on Thursday night in prime time, stretching what had been a two-day event into three. The move was in keeping with a league that has never had any scruples about being overexposed. “Everything feels bigger in prime time,” O’Reilly said. 

ESPN’s presentation has added layers over the years too. Since 2019, ABC, which like ESPN is owned by Disney, has also aired parts of the draft. In 2018, ESPN debuted a separate broadcast of the draft featuring hosts from College GameDay, the network’s popular Saturday morning college football program, a move that amplified the intersection between fans of both the amateur and professional game. 

Those types of programming decisions don’t happen without audience demand, of course, and––as Kiper observed decades ago––the draft has plenty of that. The first round of last year’s draft drew more than 10 million viewers across ABC, ESPN, and NFL Network, out-rating the 2022 Daytona 500 and barely trailing the final round of the 2022 Masters, although those events were only shown on one network. That it was the lowest-rated draft since 2016 speaks to the lofty standards set by the NFL, which accounted for 82 of the 100 most-watched television broadcasts in the US last year. In 2020, with the sporting world at a standstill and the public starved for live entertainment, the first-round NFL draft drew 15.6 million viewers, setting a new record. The following year, 12.6 million tuned in, which ranks as the second-highest showing. 

To the non-football fan, however, the draft may still be akin to a phone book recital. “It’s someone standing onstage reading names. It’s not a sporting event,” marveled Seth Markman, ESPN’s vice president of production who oversees the network’s presentation of the draft. “Yet we have hundreds of thousands of people in these cities watching.” But at its best, the draft packs enough human drama to resonate with even the most pigskin-averse. Behind every selection announced by NFL commissioner Roger Goodell this week is someone whose life is instantly changed, the cameras capturing each moment of ecstasy in real time. But the draft also brings agony, and it turns out that also makes for compelling television. 

In 1988, ESPN sent a camera crew to the apartment of Thurman Thomas, a star running back out of Oklahoma State who was expected to be a first-round pick. Instead, Thomas slid all the way to the 13th pick of the second round, when he was finally taken by the Buffalo Bills. The tradition of the jilted draft prospect was born. Berman recalls Thomas playing the waiting game, reclining on his couch and wandering to the kitchen to make a sandwich. 

Cutaways to glum-looking players waiting for their names to be called, whether in the greenroom or their homes, have become staples of the draft broadcast. Aaron Rodgers entered the 2005 draft regarded as a potential number one pick, but wound up squirming in the Javits Center greenroom for more than four hours before the Green Bay Packers wisely selected him. 

For Thomas and Rodgers, a current and future Hall of Famer respectively, the unexpected draft-day snubs have become indelible parts of their legacies. “It’s the perfect human soap opera,” Bornstein said. “It has everything that any good drama has.”