When The Las Vegas Raiders announced Indiana University quarterback Fernando Mendoza as the first overall pick in the 2026 NFL Draft yesterday, it kicked off what might just be the most special time of year for any football fan.
This three day draft period—April 23-25—is unquestionably the moment in the year when the highest number of fans are at their most optimistic. No wins, no losses, just new beginnings, new players, new possibilities.
It’s also a marquee event for the league. About 600,000 people attended last year’s draft in Green Bay over its three days, across seven rounds, 32 teams, and 257 picks. On TV and streaming, the draft drew massive audiences, with the first round averaging 13.6 million viewers across TV and digital platforms, making it the second most-watched in history.
But that is dwarfed by the draft’s presence on social media, as the league, all the teams, many of the draftee players, fan creators and influencers, all combined to make reams of content that weave together the entire story. It’s a scale and scope of mass concentrated content creation rare in any other pro sport.
Draft week on just the NFL’s own social channels now drives more than 500 million views, which has doubled in the last five years. According to the league, on TikTok during the draft last year, 30% of the reached audience was female, and 44% were 18-24, significantly younger and more female than the league’s reach during the NFL regular season.
“The draft is consistently one of the top five to 10 social moments of the year,” says Ian Trombetta, the NFL’s senior vice president of global social and influencer marketing. “Obviously we’re in a World Cup year, so there’s going to be some nuance there, but in a normal year the draft lands inside the top five.”
The NFL’s social and influencer team operates a real-time content command center to help harness the power of the occasion. On-site in Pittsburgh, its social programming team of 10 people produces about 1,000 social posts a day during the draft, from the moment a prospect’s name is called and introduced to their new city, to last-minute trades. It’s live action social media at scale. Last year, the league’s team averaged 33 pieces of content per hour during the draft on each of its three days.
Tucked inside Pittsburgh’s Acrisure Stadium, the league’s social team overlooked all the fans cheering their picks, chronicling all the action. On Day 1, on top of all the picks, there were seven trades, keeping the social team incredibly busy. Not just online, but after every trade, the whole team did push-ups to keep the energy up.
For this draft, not only is the league hoping to build on the audience it had last year, but also be the ultimate conduit and connector between all the various stakeholders across social media. Here’s how they’ll do it.
Monitor
When Mendoza’s name gets called—or any draftee for that matter—social media jumps, with not only fans of the QB and the Raiders, but also his sponsors (which include Adidas, Taco Bell, Pfizer, LinkedIn, JLab, Epic Games, Keurig, and Dr. Pepper), creators, NFL influencers and more.
One of the primary functions of the NFL’s social command center is to keep track of all of this, which then informs how it reacts (or doesn’t).
“It’s not just what’s happening on broadcast on the stage, but obviously it’s what the teams are doing, what players are doing to react to these moments, and what broader culture, whether it’s celebrities, creators, influencers, are saying about their favorite teams,” says Bryce Gustafson, NFL senior director, social programming & initiative integration. “Those are all things we’re monitoring in real time.”
There’s an hourly report that we send across the organization that looks and analyzes all the social conversation, as well as breaking news more broadly. “That sort of real-time monitoring is really important for us so that we’re not out of step from a tone perspective, or would inform if we hold off on some of the content from a creator or otherwise that just would seem inappropriate for that moment,” says Trombetta.
Create and collaborate
The role of monitoring is also to see what creators or influencers the league can collaborate or engage with during the draft. Gustafson says the goal is to push the envelope in terms of who they’re engaging with, whether in an official capacity or not. This year for example, the league will be working with popular creators from The Diamond Gym and Peters Pasta.
But Trombetta says that with their freedom across all of these stakeholders on social, comes a massive responsibility. “The league is seen as the source of truth,” says Trombetta. “There are so many rumors and speculation as to who’s getting traded or this guy might get drafted here or he might slip to there, that fans look to the NFL—especially now in this AI driven environment—to say what is accurate.”
While it’s using its own content to counter fake AI slop online, the league is also utilizing AI tools in order to be able to produce so much social content as quickly as possible. Trombetta and Gustafson’s teams will use it for everything from social listening, to tagging NFL content to creating art that shows traded players in new uniforms.
“It really cuts across so many areas at this point and we see it as a real accelerant to so many of the different aspects that we’re trying to get after,” says Trombetta.
Setting the tone
The new NFL season doesn’t start until September, but for Trombetta and Gustafson, it starts just a couple of weeks after the Super Bowl, at the NFL Combine, where college players run through a series of physical tests for NFL teams.
This is where the league’s social team starts to get a sense of how the draft may start to shake out. “That’s really our first touch point with many of these athletes in terms of whether it’s creating content directly with them, or even just simply celebrating them via our social channels through incredible athletic performances,” says Trombetta.
At the draft, once they know where the league’s newest players are headed, the league’s social content team begins to think about how they can build content around these rookies all season long.
“The draft not only gives us an opportunity to get to know the players, which is really helpful to understand what they’re like as people and how they might fit into certain campaigns, it also gives us an indication of what the true level of fan interest is in certain players,” says Trombetta.
As the draft continues, the content blitz has begun.