On Monday, the NFL announced that the 2027 NFL draft will be hosted by Washington, D.C., in partnership with the Washington Commanders, with three days of draft picks to be announced from the National Mall. This year’s draft in Green Bay brought more than 600,000 fans to Wisconsin after a record-breaking 775,000 spectators attended the 2024 draft in Detroit. The upcoming 2026 draft is being hosted by Pittsburgh.
So when is it going to come to New Orleans? The Saints have played host to eight Super Bowls, more than any other NFL city, since 1978. The city’s economy is built around tourism and you’d think it would be a natural fit. But the abundance of spring events make for a crowded calendar, and with current hotel capacity at its limit there just may not be room for hundreds of thousands of people to come see the draft.
The two big competitors are Jazz Fest and the Zurich Classic. Jazz Fest, a two-week festival celebrating New Orleans music and heritage, always falls between the last week of April and the first week of May. That covers the same window the draft is held in. Estimates put annual crows of attendees at 400,000-strong, so that’s a lot of people for the NFL to compete with.
Then you have the Zurich Classic, a professional golf tournament on the PGA Tour. Eighty pairs of golfers and their fans pack the area around TPC Louisiana; last year’s four-day event had 116,000 spectators in attendance. It does tend to move around through April, but the 2025 tournament was set for April 24-27 and the 2024 event was on April 25-28. That covers the draft, too.
So between Jazz Fest, Zurich, and the draft you’d be looking at doubling the current number of visitors. We shouldn’t overlook the French Quarter Fest in mid-April, too, which has seen attendance surge to hundreds of thousands after the COVID-19 pandemic. Even if they’ve come and went by the time the draft, and Jazz Fest, and Zurich all begin, that’s going to put a real strain on logistics in New Orleans.
Maybe things change in the next couple years. Hotel capacity could increase and more room for tourists could open up on top of all the other big events going on. It’s easy to imagine the draft stage set up at Champions Square on a sunny Thursday afternoon in late April. But imagination and reality are two different things. The draft could come to New Orleans someday, but it won’t be making a stop here any time soon.