Could Charlotte host the NFL Draft in the future? The idea is being explored

The city of Charlotte and the Carolina Panthers are exploring the possibility of hosting the NFL Draft, perhaps as early as 2026.

A six-person contingent from Charlotte went to Kansas City to check out the logistics of the event.

“It was a fact-finding mission,” Danny Morrison, the president of the Charlotte Sports Foundation, said Friday after the visit concluded. “We had a chance to walk the whole facility and get a behind-the-scenes look at all sorts of things. A number of other cities were there as well, doing the same thing.”

Kansas City is in the midst of hosting the 3-day event for the first time in 2023. Detroit has already been announced as the host for 2024. The NFL is expected to announce the site of the 2025 draft in May, and Green Bay is thought to be the favorite for that one.

Morrison, who served as Panthers president under former owner Jerry Richardson, led the Charlotte Sports Foundation’s five-person team in Kansas City that was charged with checking out the event’s setup and logistics. The team also included Kieth Cockrell, president of Bank of America.

A sixth person, Alexandra Schmidt, served as the liaison from the Carolina Panthers. She is a brand marketing manager for Tepper Sports and Entertainment.

There was an estimated crowd of 125,000 in downtown Kansas City on Thursday for the first night of the draft, which is the event’s most anticipated night. The NFL Draft typically includes concerts and various other events that take advantage of a city’s museums, parks and other public spaces — think of it as a little like the Speed Street events that used to dominate uptown Charlotte for a race week in May during their heyday, if Speed Street was bigger and televised by three TV networks at the same time. Romare Bearden Park in uptown Charlotte could be a likely centerpiece of the event.

Forbes.com reported that, according to the president of the Kansas City Sports Commission, the three-day NFL Draft was expected to have an economic impact of more than $100 million in 2023.

Other cities that have hosted the draft in past years include Dallas, Nashville and Las Vegas. The Nashville draft in 2019 set an unofficial record of 600,000 people.

The Panthers and Charlotte have previously thought about an NFL Draft bid. At one point, when the Panthers were still planning to build a new headquarters in Rock Hill, S.C., a bid was envisioned in which many of the free events would take place in uptown Charlotte but the draft itself would be in Rock Hill.

The Rock Hill project fell apart, however.

In past years, Charlotte has hosted the NBA’s All-Star game and golf’s PGA Championship and Presidents Cup. It also hosts the ACC football championship game every December.

“The beauty of Charlotte,” Morrison said, “is it delivers on big-time events.”

This story was originally published April 28, 2023 at 1:20 PM with the headline "Could Charlotte host the NFL Draft in the future? The idea is being explored."

Scott Fowler

The Charlotte Observer

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Columnist Scott Fowler has written for The Charlotte Observer since 1994 and has earned 26 APSE awards for his sportswriting. He hosted The Observer’s podcast “Carruth,” which Sports Illustrated once named “Podcast of the Year.” Fowler also conceived and hosted the online series and podcast “Sports Legends of the Carolinas,” which featured 1-on-1 interviews with NC and SC sports icons and was turned into a book. He occasionally writes about non-sports subjects, such as the 5-part series “9/11/74,” which chronicled the forgotten plane crash of Eastern Air Lines Flight 212 in Charlotte on Sept. 11, 1974. Support my work with a digital subscription