Despite the large crowd that will gather by the confluence of the three rivers on Thursday night, the NFL draft is fundamentally a TV show. And the NFL wants to control the total time taken to finish round one.
The apparent goal is to get the first round to fit within the same sort of window a primetime game consumes.
That’s why the total time between round-one picks has shrunken from 15 minutes to 10 minutes to, as of 2026, eight minutes. Cutting the allotment by 20 percent will be an issue for the teams, as Steelers G.M. Omar Khan said Monday.
And while the accumulated savings of 64 minutes could indeed help Thursday night’s TV show fit more neatly within a three-hour block, it will create a longer backlog of picks as the TV show catches up with the selection process.
That happens every year. Beyond the pick that has been announced, other picks often have already been made.
I’ve been backstage at the draft, when it was at Radio City Music Hall. There were occasions when the next three picks were already in.
That’s why it’s so easy to tip picks. Every team knows the picks that have officially been made. It only takes one person in one draft room to have a pipeline for all of them.
And that’s what’s so strange about giving the teams less time. While the league wants the whole night to move more quickly, it doesn’t want to accelerate the process of announcing some of the picks — especially not in the first half of the round.
The shrinking of the time is all about giving the league more flexibility to move at the desired pace, from start to finish. The consequence could be even more picks in the logjam while the TV show catches up.
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