NFL Network showing up-for-adoption puppies on Day 3 of the 2025 NFL Draft. NFL Network showing up-for-adoption puppies on Day 3 of the 2025 NFL Draft. (Awful Announcing on X.)
By Andrew Bucholtz on

Adding live animals to a sports broadcast can come with challenges, but it can also bring in some positive viewer comments. In recent years, NFL Network has regularly featured puppies on the third day of its NFL Draft coverage. And they did just that again Saturday, complete with football and college puns:

Here’s some of the wide-ranging praise that drew, from figures inside and outside of the sports media world:

With this year’s draft and some of its outcomes getting particularly controversial at times, the puppies were perhaps even more of a needed palate-cleanser than usual. And Day 3 of the draft tends to have a lot of on-air digressions, so this wasn’t as wild as it would have been if it was on a more serious moment. And briefly featuring up-for-adoption puppies from the Wisconsin Humane Society (logical, with this year’s draft in Green Bay) seems like as good of a use of Day 3 airtime as anything else might have been.

But animals are also just a regular part of a variety of sports and sports-adjacent broadcasts at this point, so this wasn’t all that odd. We’ll see if this leads to puppies making picks at drafts down the road.

About Andrew Bucholtz

Andrew Bucholtz has been covering sports media for Awful Announcing since 2012. He is also a staff writer for The Comeback. His previous work includes time at Yahoo! Sports Canada and Black Press.

View all posts by Andrew Bucholtz