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The 2025 NFL Draft is next week in Green Bay, Wisconsin, as hundreds of NFL Draft prospects will hope to see their name called during the three days of selections. A small group of those prospects will get to walk across the stage in Green Bay to shake NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell’s hand after their name is called.
Top prospects attending the draft used to be a big honor for those prospects, and very few players turned the invitation down. Now, tons of top prospects are forgoing attending the NFL Draft, and the NFL may chance course to help fill the Green Room.
This year, only seventeen players accepted invites to attend the draft in Green Bay. Historically, that’s a pretty low number, and plenty of those 17 are guys that are far from locks to go in the first round. Everyone remembers players like Aaron Rodgers and Brady Quinn waiting hours in the Green Room back in the day, and they want to avoid that. When Rodgers and Quinn were drafted, the draft was two days, with rounds 1-3 on Saturday and the rest of the draft on Sunday. They were guaranteed to go sometime on the first day. Now, with the first round taking place on Thursday night, some players are worried about slipping out and having to come back the next day.
This low invitation acceptance may cause the NFL to change how they handle invites. Here’s Pro Football Talk with more.
There was a time when the league invited players who were expected to be hanging around beyond the first night. Per a source with knowledge of the situation, there’s a current appetite to expand the pool of invitations to players who aren’t expected to be picked until the third day, when rounds four through seven play out.
It’s a shift from more recent efforts to ensure that the draft will have players present who won’t experience an on-site free fall. But it’s still unavoidable. Without a clear and firm commitment from a team that it will definitely take a given player in round one, there’s always a chance that (like Will Levis two years ago) the league will invite a player whose wait will extend to the second day.
That’s one of the risks the league took when making Alabama quarterback Jalen Milroe one of the 17 players who’ll be at Lambeau Field in nine days. There’s a chance Milroe will be back on Friday.
It seems like we may see a lot more players attending the draft in the future.