1 week Ago By Draft Wire
There's a good chance you'll see a lot more casual yawning at the office or the bus stop on Monday than a normal day. The 2025 NFL Draft and its schedule and pacing are the primary culprit. The draft kicked off Thursday night at 8 p.
m. ET, which was 7 p.m.
at the event in Green Bay. Friday night's second and third rounds commenced at 7 ET, while Saturday's final four rounds flowed from noon ET. In short, the NFL puts the "long" in long weekend.
And that needs to change. There is certainly room for speeding up the glacial pace of the first round. The 32 picks on Thursday night took three hours and 29 minutes, ending just before the calendar changed to Friday in the Eastern time zone.
It's a slog to stay up on a weeknight for the entirety of the first round. Having attended recent first rounds in Chicago, Cleveland and Detroit, it feels even longer and more unnecessarily slow-paced in person. Random fun fact from the #NFLDraft, the time each round took:Rd.
1- 3:29Rd.2- 2:17Rd.3- 1:55Rd.
4- 1:52Rd.5- 1:43Rd.6- 1:50Rd.
7- 1:32Total Time: 14 hours & 38 minutes— Anthony Bellino (@ACBellino) April 27, 2025In an appearance on the Pat McAfee Show on Friday, NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell lamented that the first round lasted too long. Goodell even made an impromptu suggestion on how to fix it. “I started thinking last night we gotta shorten [the draft],” Goodell said.
"I’m making it up, seven-minute first round, but you can get two minutes extra if you need it. You could call it, but then you don’t get it again the rest of the draft.”Goodell's idea is a good one.
Teams have had weeks to prepare their draft boards and play through different selection scenarios. This isn't the NBA, where the draft comes just days after the end of the playoff finals. The Super Bowl was months ago.
NFL teams have well-staffed scouting departments and front offices that are often stuffed with veteran assistants with several weeks to prepare. It shouldn't take 15 minutes for the Tennessee Titans to confirm what the football world has known for weeks and turn in the draft card with Cam Ward's name on it for the first pick. The trade at No.
2 between the Jacksonville Jaguars and Cleveland Browns didn't magically happen within the subsequent 15-minute time block, either. NFL execs past and present consistently espouse how much planning and preparation go into drafts, including contingency plans if one thing happens, or a team does something crazy. Those calls between GMs about "if Player X is available, what do you want for us to come trade for your pick?" have been happening for weeks.
They don't need 15 minutes to make that final decision. Later in the draft, the primary frustration comes from the unnecessary delay of when "the pick is in" shows up on the network crawl, but the announcement of the pick doesn't happen for minutes. As an example, the pick was in for the Baltimore Ravens in the fourth round for over three minutes before it was announced that the Ravens selected California LB Teddye Buchanan.
That's three extra, completely unnecessary minutes of talking heads dissecting the same Shedeur Sanders storyline for a third day. Nobody asked for that. Ravens fans wanted to know who their team selected, or a quick bathroom break, or anything but more waiting.
The NFL has to appease its advertisers, no doubt. Converting an otherwise mundane procedural into a major made-for-TV event requires rewarding those who make it happen. But the ads aren't the issue.
It's the wasted and completely unnecessary time between selections. Goodell was spot-on in his desire to trim some draft fat. Here's hoping he pushes the agenda to his employer, the NFL owners.
This article originally appeared on Draft Wire: The NFL needs to speed up future drafts, especially the first round.
