Joining the rest of the Sports World, the NFL Draft is the most recent major sports event to be disrupted by the Coronavirus Pandemic. The Draft was originally set to occur April 23-25 in Las Vegas. As of now it has not been cancelled or postponed, but many changes are expected to impact the original plan.
The grand event was set to occur near the Bellagio Hotel with plans to shut down an entire street. The NFL revealed plans for a red carpet stage to be set up in the famous fountain of the Bellagio. Any player participating in the draft would be shuttled by boat to the stage in the center of the water to walk the red carpet and have their pictures taken.
The main draft stage was to be set up next to the Caesars Forum Conference Center. The stage would be similar to stages of years past, with representatives from all 32 teams set up for the festivities.
However, recent shelter-in-place and stay-at-home orders that vary by state have caused the NFL to throw out these plans. The revised draft structure would have the league broadcast from a remote location with teams on the clock and draft prospects filming from different locations to reduce the amount of people in a single area.
With even more information about the virus and how it’s spread coming in regularly, the set up may be changed even further. The league recently ordered all facilities to be closed which would make filming impossible. The most extreme option would have league officials filming the draft from home, in an unprecedented production of the annual event.
The most important thing for the upcoming draft is ensuring the safety and well being of all prospects, league officials, and crew. I’m sure this is not the way the prospects envisioned their rise to the largest stage in football, but they are still joining the highest ranks of professional athletes. With less than a month to go, the NFL will be regarded with high standards for how it handled these once in a lifetime events.
NFL Updates 2020 
It will definitely be interesting to see what happens with the NFL draft. I think the virtual style will be the beginning to a very unique season. With the way things are looking, the draft will not be the only part affected. At this point, it does not seem too far-fetched that the season could be delayed altogether.
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Hey Paige,
This is going to be an interesting draft for sure and one that will be a test case for many sporting events. As it will be without fans, we will get a preview of the atmosphere of an event that is usually highly energetic. The technological part of this should be simple, these teams have state of the art everything so I’d imagine that won’t be an issue. It also comes as a great time as there is such little content that fans are going to consume this almost uniformly.
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