It’s one of the most important weeks in the NFL. Coaches, GMs and owners can alter their franchises’ trajectory for a generation if they make the right choices in the coming 72 hours. But at the same time, you won’t know how a pick is going to pan out for months or years later, so it’s hard to have a compelling real-time take. Which makes the draft TV show, in my opinion, something less than the sum of its parts, barring some huge outlier scenario.
The Cowboys extended their lease agreement for AT&T Stadium more than 14 years early, seeking certainty over leverage. AP
Jerry Jones is a master of leverage and timing in high-stakes business deals. North Texas is one of the country’s most robust regions when it comes to local governments being willing to spend on private sports teams. Other NFL teams have recently landed favorable terms by waiting until lease expirations are on the horizon and exploring options in other jurisdictions.
So why did the Cowboys just renew their lease to AT&T Stadium more than 14 years early, in an understated, calm process with the city of Arlington? In short, the certainty today is worth more to Jones and the Cowboys right now than leverage in 5-10 years.
“Signing the extension now creates predictability which allows growth and investment to happen,” said Cowboys General Counsel Jason Cohen. “If you know the Cowboys will be in Arlington for the next 30 years, it’s a different mindset for how you approach the long-term planning. It’s good for everyone to have that certainty. You can amortize costs and feel better about doubling down on different projects.”
The Cowboys had been locked into AT&T Stadium through May 2040, but now they will be there through May 2055. As part of the deal, the Cowboys commit to spending at least $750 million in maintenance, operations and improvements through the end of the term. Arlington committed $273 million in taxpayer funds to upgrade the stadium site. The Cowboys will keep their annual rent payment at $2 million and share $500,000 of naming rights revenue annually with the city, both through 2055.
It didn’t require a public vote because the funding comes from mechanisms voters already approved for the venue in 2004 and 2016. Also, Arlington paid off the original debt for the stadium a decade early.
Perhaps also implicit in Jones’ judgment: a sense that the business-friendly political environment in Texas is particularly good right now, but it might not always be that way. Maybe by the mid-2030s, voter hostility toward sports subsidies, already widespread in much of the country, will grow in the Dallas area.
The Texans drafted C.J. Stroud second overall in 2023, one of the many first-rounders that Athletes First has represented in recent years. Stroud-beauty
Athletes First looks primed to represent the most NFL Draft first-round picks Thursday night, with rival agency CAA Sports trailing behind in second place, SBJ’s Irving Mejia-Hilario reports. The two have been going back and forth for the last 10 years over which agency is the most dominant in the first round.
CAA Sports enters this year’s draft in Pittsburgh on a two-year winning streak. Last year, the agency represented seven round one selections, barely beating out Athletes First, which notched six selections. But in 2024, CAA Sports completed the most commanding performance of any agency in NFL Draft history when they represented 12 draftees in the first round, setting a new record for any agency.
This year, things looks like they will turn back in favor of Athletes First, as it picked up Miami edge Rueben Bain Jr. as a client this week. His addition bulks up an already impressive draft class featuring potential first rounders such as Utah OT Spencer Fano, Notre Dame RB Jeremiyah Love, Texas Tech edge David Bailey, LSU CB Mansoor Delane, Tennessee CB Jermod McCoy and Arizona State OT Max Iheanachor.
In anticipation of its big night, Athletes First is holding a special NFL Draft party at The New Port Theater in Corona Del Mar, where it will be sharing its clients’ live reactions.
CAA Sports and other rivals, such as Excel Sports Management and Klutch Sports, will likely still have a strong night, with a fair share of first-round selections, but it looks like Athletes First will regain its NFL Draft crown in 2026.
Other agencies to watch this year are WIN Sports Group, who will be participating in its first NFL Draft since WME Sports’ divestment from its football practice; and The Familie, GSE Worldwide and On Time Agency, who will each look to represent their first-ever first round selection.
Many thousands of people came to the NFL Draft in Green Bay, but probably not as many as most public estimates claim. Getty Images
It seems like more people are getting the memo about the eye-popping but loosey-goosey attendance numbers that emerge from the NFL Draft. That is: They’re not reliable, at least not as we typically understand the word “attendance” in a sports context.
To state it simply, the numbers include duplicates, and not just the possibility that the same person is counted twice. The way the methodology works, the numbers include the same person counted many times. Every time someone passes through security into the draft perimeter, that counts as a tally mark.
In prior drafts, officials on-site tell me privately you’d see the same groups come and go a half-dozen times or more. That’s the nature of the pleasant, festival-like feeling around the draft, where hours might pass between your priority picks and there are multiple points of interest. In Pittsburgh, this methodology seems particularly prone to challenges because there are two different draft zones, which both require security screening.
Visit Pittsburgh projects 500,000 to 700,000 people. Now, look at the hotel data that local CBS affiliate KDKA reported earlier this month: As of April 11, Allegheny County’s 19,000 hotel rooms had just 60% occupancy for the nights of the draft. I admit that draft fans may be a late-planning bunch, but if there were anywhere close to 700,000 individual people coming, you’d expect more stress on those accommodations. (Incidentally, there are still rooms available for Thursday night.)
As I wrote Monday, the NFL doesn’t project an official number, citing the difficulty in predicting attendance to a free event. Attendees are supposed to register with the NFL’s OnePass app, but without a financial transaction, people may decide to come at the last minute or register and then not show.
Also, to the league, it mostly doesn’t matter. The size of the crowd doesn’t meaningfully change the NFL’s economics, and whatever the real number is, it’s still huge.
But that number is important to civic boosters, who use it to justify the expense of the draft, and that’s where these stats get political, and therefore, fair game for rigorous evaluation. Visit Pittsburgh projects $120 million-$213 million in new economic activity based in part on the attendance guess. Also, the politicians won’t ever let methodology get in the way of claiming a “record,” which is probably how the ever-escalating draft attendance numbers got started in the first place. As I wrote last May, two well-placed sources told me they think the 775,000 number pushed out by Michigan politicians in 2024 was more like 450,000-500,000.
Nobody’s trying to say that it won’t be a few big days in the Burgh. It will be one of the city’s largest public gatherings ever. But it seems worth noting that, in reality, we’re probably talking about crowds several times bigger than a sell-out at Acrisure Stadium, not 10- or 11-times larger.
In this week’s SBJ Marketing, my colleague Terry Lefton analyzes how the NFL transformed one sponsorship asset that Visa once held into three spread among American Express, U.S. Bank and PayPal.
Fanatics is the NFL’s new, official on-site retail sponsor at the league’s roster of marquee global events, including Thursday’s draft, the Super Bowl and international games, writes SBJ’s Bret McCormick.
At last week’s CAA World Congress of Sports, NFL CRO and EVP Renie Anderson discussed the league’s ambitions for flag football, reports SBJ’s Rachel Axon, especially with its upcoming Olympic spotlight: “We don’t want to be a one and done. This isn’t the breakdancing of the Olympics.”
On this week’s SBJ Sports Media Podcast, co-hosts Austin Karp and Josh Carpenter dive into the NFL Draft and discuss Mike Tomlin’s new job on NBC’s “Football Night in America.”
Chiefs EVP/Communications David Higdon said he is leaving the franchise at the end of the month. In his time with the Chiefs, Higdon led executive communications, government affairs and community engagement resulting in a $4 billion agreement for a public-private stadium in Kansas.
