Kicking off the start of a new season in the National Football League, also known as the NFL, the annual NFL Draft takes place each spring. This is a three-day-long event, consisting of seven rounds where teams select players who have completed their college football eligibility to join their team on a rookie contract. Teams select in order of their win-loss record from the season prior, with the team with the worst record selecting first and the team that won the Super Bowl selecting last. This year, the 2025 NFL Draft took place in Green Bay, Wisconsin, from Thursday, April 24, through Saturday, April 26.
The lead-up to this draft was one of the most uneventful in NFL history. For the first time, every team had its first-round pick going into the draft, since no trades involving first-round picks took place prior to the start of the draft. In addition, only one pre-draft trade took place between the Houston Texans and the Cleveland Browns involving fifth and sixth-round picks. But once the draft got started, teams started to make moves.
As predicted, the first pick of the draft was University of Miami quarterback Cameron Ward, who was drafted by the Tennessee Titans. Considering that the Titans previously lacked talent at the position in the season prior, taking a quarterback who was considered to be the best in this draft class was no surprise to most.
The surprise came with the next pick, not because of who was picked, but by which team picked him. The Jacksonville Jaguars traded with the Cleveland Browns from the fifth pick up to the second pick to draft University of Colorado Boulder cornerback and wide receiver Travis Hunter. Hunter is a first in the NFL, a player who plans to play on both sides of the ball (offense and defense) as a cornerback and wide receiver, which he did so in college with great success.
The rest of round one went pretty much as everyone thought it would, with only three other sets of teams making trades through the duration of the round: the Houston Texans and New York Giants, the Los Angeles Rams and the Atlanta Falcons, and the Kansas City Chiefs and Philadelphia Eagles. Nevertheless, the biggest talk of the draft wasn’t about who was picked, but about who hadn’t yet been picked. Colorado Boulder quarterback Shedeur Sanders was not picked in the first round; in fact he was picked as the sixth pick in the fifth round. (the 144th pick overall) Many attribute this slip in the draft to the media attention his father, University of Colorado Boulder football coach Deion Sanders, brought to his son and his possible involvement in the pre-draft process. Nonetheless, Sanders was drafted by the Cleveland Browns in the fifth round, despite the team already drafting University of Oregon quarterback Dillon Gabriel in the third round.
The back half of the draft didn’t end with any huge stories or picks, with eight different quarterbacks being selected and the last pick, otherwise known as “Mr. Irrelevant”, being Memphis University cornerback Kobee Minor.
The 2025 draft came to a close Saturday afternoon, kicking off the new NFL season and 257 new players’ NFL careers.