Green Bay Police Officers watch the 2025 NFL Draft theater area on April 26, 2025. PC: Fox 11 Online
GREEN BAY, WI (WTAQ-WLUK) — Green Bay officials held a post-NFL Draft meeting Tuesday.
City leaders, public safety officials, local business representatives, and community partners reflected on the execution of the NFL Draft and shared key takeaways from the largest event in Green Bay’s history.
“Now that it’s over I want to do it again,” said Leah Weycker with the Military Avenue Business Improvement District.
Officials talked about the planning, crowd management, economic and community impacts, highlights and lessons learned.
“We just pulled off something that this area has never seen or really witnessed and planned for. Really, I just think this kind of sets the stage for us to be able to do these type of events into the future,” added Brown County Executive Troy Streckenbach.
It wasn’t just in the draft footprint where the community excelled. The city working with its business improvement districts and other entities on events outside of the draft campus.
The Draft City Music Fest, which provided bookend events to the draft — along with the Booyah Battle and Kringle Combine fundraisers – bringing in crowds of their own. Those events, on top of all the draft hoopla, helping to boost the city’s confidence moving forward.
According to James Andersen, the deputy parks director in Green Bay, “I think with this whole experience, I think it’s kind of changed the way we maybe envisioned what’s possible and I think it’s really exciting to know that we can start to have these conversations and it’s not like something really different now. We know it’s possible, we know we can do these things, we can build upon it.”
And the wheels are already starting to spin.
Green Bay Mayor, Eric Genrich, added, “There’s a lot that’s possible that maybe wasn’t on our radar previously. We’ve got some big events coming to the city, maybe one of the most prominent will be the Badgers/Notre Dame game in 2026. I think even starting now to think about what we can do from city’s point of view to leverage that event in a similar fashion to how we worked with the NFL Draft is big take away for me.”
More than 600,000 people attended the NFL Draft in Green Bay over three days, matching with Nashville in 2019 and behind only Detroit, which had 775,000 people attend the draft in 2024. The NFL was originally predicting just 250,000 attendees.
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