It takes a truly special event to shut down Las Vegas Boulevard. New Year’s Eve is one of those events. The Rock ‘n’ Roll Las Vegas Marathon is another. And now, you can add the National Football League (NFL) Draft to that exclusive list.
The NFL conducts its draft every spring. For years, it held the event in New York City. But in 2015, it began to move to cities around the U.S. like Dallas, Nashville and last year’s host city, Cleveland.
Las Vegas—this year’s draft city—was originally set to play host to the event in 2020. A global pandemic, though, caused the NFL to move the draft to a virtual event and delay its Vegas debut.
Cut to April 28-30, 2022, and at least 600,000 football fans touched down in Vegas to celebrate their teams’ draft picks, sing along with musical acts and boo the NFL commissioner whenever he took the stage.
Along with this group were several meeting and event planners, whom Caesars Entertainment invited to experience the NFL Draft experience in person and behind the scenes.
As the first Official Casino Sponsor of the NFL, Caesars provided fans the opportunity to participate in the NFL Draft Experience located behind the High Roller and The LINQ, which is adjacent to CAESARS FORUM.
The NFL Draft Theater itself was also located behind the FORUM. The 4,000-capacity theater featured 2,000 light fixtures, 10.8 million pixels of LED lights across 5,022 square feet of LED screens and 350,000 watts of sound amplification power.
There were also some great marketing materials involving the teams as playing cards that this writer is eagerly waiting for the NFL to sell. And believe me, this writer walked everywhere looking to see if the playing cards were available yet.
The first crew to set up the experience arrived on April 1, according to NFL representatives on a behind-the-scenes tour of the draft operations. By Wednesday before the draft, the stage was completely built and the NFL was in its final stages leading up to the event.
The meeting and event planners were able to walk on the stage, visit the green room where draftees and their families waited for their numbers to be called and even got to walk the same route to the stage a draftee would when his name was announced.
The planners learned that the biggest challenge to in-person drafts now is the added health and safety aspects, due to the pandemic. They also learned that it’s about a 35-person team that leads the NFL events, along with more than 1,000 staff and volunteers.
And the same things that meeting and event planners look for when choosing their destinations are pretty much the same things the NFL looks for: infrastructure, number of hotel rooms, business goals, ability to work with city/county officials, etc.
Along with the behind-the-scenes look at the draft, the planners where able to experience a tour of Allegiant Stadium, home of the NFL’s Las Vegas Raiders and the University of Nevada, Las Vegas Rebels.
But more to come on that when our full story about the NFL Draft event is published in an upcoming issue of The Meeting Professional, the MPI magazine. You’ll want to make it your No. 1 pick to read.
