Jim Souhan: Hosting the NFL draft is a big deal for Minneapolis. It didn't used to be.

Jim Souhan, The Minnesota Star Tribune on May 20, 2026

Published in Football

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MINNEAPOLIS — The NFL draft will be held in downtown Minneapolis around U.S. Bank Stadium in 2028.

Of all the big events Minnesota has hosted so well over the years, this will be one of them.

The draft is a spectacle for the speculative.

There will be NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell becoming a human Snuggie, wrapping himself around every prospect who comes on stage.

There will be a massive media presence, and a massive crowd of people, many of whom will scream and cheer when their favorite team takes a left guard from a small school they couldn’t locate on a map.

The draft — our draft — will attract fans from all over the country, if not the world, filling our streets with those wondering whether that safety from Kent State running a 4.3 at the combine would be the ideal sixth-round pick.

Like everything else in the NFL multiverse, the draft has grown into an entertainment hub all its own. This is a league that can turn its schedule release into a weeklong drama that drives ratings.

Which reminds me of the first NFL draft I covered, at the Vikings’ Winter Park facility in Eden Prairie, in 1990. Which was not a spectacle.

The stars of that show: One dog-eared draft pamphlet, no internet and a bag of chips.

The draft was popular then, but it didn’t draw hundreds of thousands of fans. Mock drafts were done by two cult figures, Mel Kiper and Joel Buchsbaum. Kiper was turning himself into a TV star. Buchsbaum was a reclusive writer for Pro Football Weekly who would mail you his draft preview if you sent him a check.

The internet was not a thing yet, so there weren’t 100 new mock drafts every day to peruse. Most mock drafts were assembled by a couple of local sportswriters, and ran the week of the draft.

I was so excited to cover that draft in 1990 that I drank gallons of coffee in the morning … and in the early afternoon. Problem was, the Vikings had traded their top draft picks for Herschel Walker, so myself and a couple of other reporters watched television in the dank basement of Winter Park while we waited for the Vikings to make their selections.

When they did, legendary personnel gurus Frank Gilliam and Jerry Reichow walked down the steps, sat at a well-used table and told us, bluntly, whether they thought they had found any players who might help the team.

We did get to snack on a bag of chips.

Back then, the NFL was still a mom-and-pop league. Most of the teams were owned by local families. The stadiums were mostly awful, the fields were sometimes worse, and the draft — like the schedule release, the scouting combine and training camp practices — had yet to become a big deal. The league would shut down for weeks, if not months, during the summer.

At some point in the ‘90s, the league realized that NFL fans were insatiable. That’s why today we have games all over the globe, sold-out training camp practices, full coverage of the combine, schedule-release parties and, yes, a “draft season” that begins in September and runs through late April. For true draftniks, there is always a mock draft to read if you’re bored on Memorial Day or the Fourth of July.

Because we have so much to offer in the Twin Cities, and because we in flyover country lack self esteem, we tend to be very good at staging big events.

As the sign at the 1987 World Series in the Metrodome said: “We like it here.” So there.

We are considered a middling market, yet we have the WNBA, NBA, NHL, NFL, MLB, Class AAA baseball, PWHL, Big Ten, MLS, a PGA Tour stop that will feature Scottie Scheffler and a women’s golf major this year. There’s women’s soccer, volleyball and football, and winter sports and here let me apologize if I left out your favorite local team or sports.

We’ve got it going on, and the people who organize and attract our big events almost always receive high grades.

Out of respect for this moment in Twin Cities sports history, I won’t point out that the NFL draft is mostly a bad reality TV show. Fans get emotionally attached to people they don’t know who may not even make their team.

None of which matters to the hundreds of thousands of fans who will travel to Minnesota and cheer at the draft like they’re watching the Super Bowl.

This is a good time to follow the NFL.

This is an even better time to be the NFL.