For decades the NFL Draft took place somewhere in New York City. Whether it was Radio City Music Hall, Madison Square Garden, or a fancy pants hotel like the Omni or the Marriott Marquis, you could count on the dreams of college football players coming true in New York.

(This is why Alicia Keys told us that New York is “the concrete jungle where dreams are made of”… she was singing about the NFL Draft!)

But as popularity for the NFL Draft continued to grow over the years, the league decided to wisen up and take this show on the road. Since 2016, the Draft has taken place in Chicago, Philadelphia, Arlington, Nashville, Cleveland, Las Vegas, Kansas City, and in 2020 during the pandemic, over a live-feed from Roger Goodell's home. Next spring, the league will be bringing the Draft to Detroit, and in 2025, live from historic Lambeau Field, the Draft will take place in Green Bay, Wisconsin.

However, putting the Draft in Green Bay poses some logistical issues for schools and surrounding businesses, according to Danielle DuClos of the Green Bay Press Gazette.

With all due respect to the folks of Green Bay, Wisconsin, I'm not going too far out on a limb here when I say that Green Bay is not a traditional tourist destination. It's also not your typical NFL market. The Green Bay metro area is home to roughly 800,000 fewer people than Buffalo, New York, which is the second-smallest market in the NFL. So with the influx of somewhere in the neighborhood of 250,000 visitors to the city in the last week of April 2025, eight different Green Bay-area school districts are expected to be impacted by the Draft.

The easy and already proposed solution would be for the 2024-25 school year to begin a week earlier than normal, which would allow for students to be off from school the week of the NFL Draft. The logic behind this proposal is that it could end up preventing a traffic nightmare in the Green Bay metro area during the week of the Draft. These proposals are waiting on approval from the Department of Public Instruction, per DuClos.