The Shedeur Sanders slide gave even the most casual sports fan an easy in to this year’s NFL Draft. Curiosity about where Sanders would go coupled with the sideshow that was Mel Kiper Jr. losing his cool made 2025 one of the more intriguing drafts to watch in years. Midday on a Saturday, that was more than enough of a reason to tune into ESPN for an hour or two.
As a result, Day Three viewership soared by 43%, making it the most watched Saturday draft broadcast on record.
It’s always an easy bet to assume growth when it comes to the NFL, but the Green Bay extravaganza was far from unique. The Sanders-Kiper show instead was just the latest sports draft to draw massive viewership. As athletes’ personal stories become an even bigger part of the fan experience and live sports soak up more of the limited remaining traditional television eyeballs, drafts are exploding.
Fresh off breaking the all-time NCAA basketball scoring record and a second straight appearance in the championship game last spring, Caitlin Clark headed to New York for the WNBA Draft. There she was joined by her rival Angel Reese to break yet another record. Two-and-a-half million fans tuned into the 2024 WNBA Draft, making it the first to break 500,000 and easily the most-watched ever.
But with labor strife looming and NIL deals soaring, most of the top pro prospects in the 2025 class returned to school. Clark rival and fan favorite Paige Bueckers was the only household name selected this past April, but that didn’t matter. The draft retained more than half its viewership. If a plateau is coming post-Clark, it appears to be at least double the previous status quo for the women’s league.
The NBA also managed to retain a large portion of its phenom-driven draft ratings leap. In 2023, the arrival of French sensation Victor Wembanyama broke the eight-year-old record to become the most-watched NBA draft ever. The following year, with hardly one top-five prospect known to the average fan, the event barely missed a beat. Nearly 4.5 million people tuned into the 2024 edition, only a slight dip from the nearly 5 million who watched Wembanyama put on his Spurs hat as the No. 1 pick.
The story was the same almost everywhere. From the NHL to MLB to even the debut of the NWSL’s draft on ION, the past two to five years have seen impressive viewership across the landscape.
So is the sports world suddenly draft-hungry, obsessing over the minutiae of a player’s teenage game film? Probably not.
As with any viewership conversation in the 2020s, the easy explanation is the measurements. Nielsen has dramatically expanded how it counts viewers in recent years. Not only is the industry-standard ratings analyst now measuring smart TVs, it has now set up “out-of-home” analysis in several more cities around the country. This is why the Super Bowl keeps breaking records, no matter who is playing, how close the game is, or what network it airs on.
So these drafts — which are all either on ABC, ESPN, or other broadcast networks including ION — benefit greatly simply from more people being counted. That’s the obvious explanation.
The other one is more useful, but harder to pin down. Data show that Americans find athletes “nearly twice as likable as influencers,” and the distinction between those two groups of celebrities is going away. Even top stars like LeBron James, Lionel Messi and Travis Kelce are now production executives, food and beverage distributors, and star podcasters.
But the biggest change driving excitement around drafts is happening a few rungs below those legends. New laws allowing athletes to profit off their NIL (name, image and likeness) has turned high school and college stars into brands and celebrities at a scale on par with the pros. Some of the more savvy NIL maneuverers, like Livvy Dunne or Jared McCain, have generated equal or greater audiences for their content than their sports careers.
When McCain went to the podium in 2024, his highly engaged community on YouTube and TikTok saw it as the continuation of the story they’d participated in for more than a year — from Southern California to Durham to Philadelphia. Sure, plenty of 76ers fans might be excited to see who was the next piece of The Process. But a fair amount of these viewers (we can assume) also were charting McCain’s course.
The same is true for Shedeur Sanders, Paige Bueckers, Connor Bedard or Paul Skenes. While Kiper and the rest of the media pored over mock drafts and scouting notes to explain Sanders’ fall, his curious fans saw the next chapter in their favorite young QB’s story. Online communities are intensely loyal and motivated to support influencers in any realm. That’s why “Swifties” buy up every Taylor Swift re-release or bonus edition, and how Jake Paul spent his way into a boxing career.
Tell these fans that they can watch and support their favorite athlete by tuning into ESPN at 7 p.m., and that’s exactly what they will do. Some may catch up with clips online or when the creator puts out content about their experience at the draft. Not every new viewer is an online follower.
We can’t measure exactly how much of the draft viewership spike comes from these “stans.” Just like we don’t know for sure how much of the growth is authentic versus a product of Nielsen’s shenanigans.
But drafts have been around as long as sports. They are becoming more popular faster than regular-season games and other sports content.
Because it aligns with so many key trends in how fans interact with influencers in and outside sports, we can only assume this surge in popularity in drafts is driven by the same forces that have made content creators some of the biggest celebrities in this country and worldwide.
