“With the first pick in the 2025 NFL Draft, the NFL selects … Green Bay, Wisconsin.”
— Roger Goodell, 2023
GREEN BAY, Wis. — For nearly two years, Debbie Jacques and Erin Peterson wondered what an NFL draft in their front yard would look like. Less than two weeks ago, their wonders turned into amazement when the stage where NFL commissioner Roger Goodell will announce the first selections in the draft on Thursday night rose from the ground.
Jacques and Peterson have views that no one else in the world can claim. Their houses, across the street from each other on the corners of Lombardi Avenue and Oneida Street, sit only 75 yards from the back of the draft stage.
They’re quite literally the closest houses to an NFL draft.
Ever.
Of course, before this year, the league never brought its second-biggest event to the NFL’s smallest city: Green Bay, Wisconsin. Population: 107,544.
“Watching the construction go up and taking everything in, it’s almost overwhelming,” said Jacques as she stood in the driveway of her duplex on the northeast corner of Lombardi and Oneida while watching workers construct the stage.
“It has been so long since we put in the initial application to host the draft; now that it’s here, it’s just hard to believe it’s going to be here.”
Yes, Jacques used the word “we” when she spoke of her city’s and her team’s bid to host the draft. When you’ve lived across the street from Lambeau Field for 22 years and can look out your window to see the draft stage, you can say “we.”
Her neighbor on the northwest corner of the intersection, Peterson, used the same word when asked whether the Packers and Green Bay could pull this off.
“I know we can do it,” said Peterson who has lived in the duplex across from Jacques for nearly 15 years.
“It’s a once-in-a-lifetime experience,” she added. “I know there’s some in the community that are annoyed by it — the road closures, the construction, everything that comes with this — but living right here, I haven’t found it to get in the way or anything.
“Just super excited about it.”
Green Bay wasn’t always a lock to host the draft. The Packers — along with Discover Green Bay (essentially the city’s convention and visitors bureau) — were denied several times, beginning with their first bid in 2016.
Since then, the following steps helped boost the area’s profile and sway the NFL:
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Growth of the Titletown District, which will host NFL Draft Experience events
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Addition in 2021 of a new expo center, which will serve as the backstage/green room for the draft adjacent to the stage
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Opening of several new luxury hotels
Having the iconic Lambeau Field, which-along with the stage-will bookend the crowd, certainly helped.
“We needed to find the right place and build it out where you’ve got the reverse shot of Lambeau,” said Peter O’Reilly, the NFL’s executive vice president of club business and league events. “But then it was important also to allow fans to go into Lambeau, do the Lambeau Leap and then for us, obviously, every hotel will be full, every Airbnb will be full.”
Lodging was foremost on the list of concerns when it came to bringing the draft to Green Bay. According to Discover Green Bay president and CEO Brad Toll, there are 5,000 hotel rooms in Brown County, plus another 5,000 in the Fox Cities area of Appleton and Oshkosh within an hour drive. Hotels in Milwaukee, nearly a two-hour drive, will also be used with shuttle buses running between the two cities.
When asked how many rooms the NFL reserved before the draft was announced for Green Bay, one local hotel operator said: “All of them.”
“I’m not sure about that,” O’Reilly said. “But there was obviously a close working relationship with the visitor bureau and the Packers on making sure we’ve got the right accommodations. I think a lot of people will be coming in from further afield as well.”
Toll said initially all hotels in the area were asked to hold 85% of their rooms for the NFL before anything went on sale to the public for draft week. Not all of those ended up being used by the NFL and its partners/vendors, and there were still rooms and house rentals available at the beginning of draft week.
“We have about two-thirds to three-quarters of the rooms committed,” Toll said a week before the draft.
Green Bay will never host a Super Bowl for myriad reasons — the lack of hotels and convention space for starters — but the risk of inclement weather is chief among them.
“If you spend $8,000 on a Super Bowl ticket and we have a blizzard and you can’t get to Green Bay, what planner would ever agree to take those risks?” Toll said. “This really has become our Super Bowl.”
At Green Bay Austin Straubel International Airport, where three airlines provide commercial routes to Atlanta, Chicago, Detroit and Minneapolis, additional flights were added for draft week on those routes, plus flights to and from Los Angeles, New York, Orlando and Salt Lake City, according to airport director Marty Piette.
In Piette’s 10 years on the job, he said the most planes that he has ever seen land in Green Bay for a single event was about 150 — many of them private — for a playoff game against the Cowboys in January 2017. He expects this to rival — or exceed — that.
“We’re ready, and we’re prepared for it,” Piette said.
For years, the draft was more of a made-for-TV event and less of a spectator attraction. It was held in New York (first in a conference room and later at Radio City Music Hall) from 1965 to 2014. The last time the event was held in Wisconsin was the 1940 draft in Milwaukee.
In 2015, the NFL turned it into a road show, going to Chicago, Philadelphia, Dallas, Nashville, Cleveland, Las Vegas, Kansas City and Detroit before coming to Green Bay.
None of those, however, took place steps from someone’s house.
“Does it stretch us a little bit?” Toll said. “Definitely. We’ve never told residents we’re shutting down the main artery in that area for two weeks. Residents are curious about how this is going to go, but it’s exciting.
“It puts us on a world stage for three days. From a tourism/marketing perspective, I can’t imagine anything bigger than this.”
— Lambeau Field (@LambeauField) April 11, 2025
It’s so big that two area school districts canceled classes during the draft because of concerns over traffic flow and safety in an emergency situation. Students and teachers in the Green Bay Area Public School District will be off beginning Wednesday. School superintendent Vicki Bayer said she consulted the Detroit school district to see how they handled it last year and was told their schools were “so far away that they knew it wouldn’t impact traffic at all.”
That’s not the case here.
“If you drew like a 10-mile radius around the stadium,” she said, “you’d capture a lot of our schools.”
The Ashwaubenon School District buildings are even closer. Valley View Elementary is seven-tenths of a mile from Lambeau Field, while its middle school and high school are barely more than a mile away. Classes in the village of Ashwaubenon were canceled for Thursday and Friday.
“We’re not Detroit, where [the draft was] in a downtown metropolitan area,” Ashwaubenon school superintendent Kurt Weyers said. “This is right in our homes.”
Adjusting to the NFL schedule is nothing new in Ashwaubenon. During regular-season games on Monday or Thursday nights, those schools let out at 1 p.m. to beat the game traffic. Ashwaubenon schools will sell parking for the draft at $60 a spot. They have more than 1,000 spots available. Proceeds will fund sports teams, clubs and school organizations.
Inside the Lambeau Field Atrium, the Packers started a countdown-to-the-draft clock. It began at 345 days.
“It is a daily reminder how fast it’s coming up,” Murphy said recently.
Yet not once did anyone connected to the draft doubt they could pull it off.
“From the beginning, we were like, we can do that,” Toll said. “Then when you’re actually awarded it, you’re celebrating, and then quickly you have to realize we are doing this.
“Early on we were talking with one of the vendors with the NFL, they said, ‘This will happen, it will happen in Green Bay.’ There was kind of a reality check that it’s going to actually happen. Now being this close, I know we can do this and we will do this.”
The boon for the local economy is expected to be massive. Toll and Packers president and CEO Mark Murphy have consistently estimated a local economic impact of $20 million and a statewide impact of $94 million, thanks to an influx of more than 250,000 visitors expected over the three days of the draft.
Peterson has cashed in on that to the tune of $32,000. She rented the other half of her duplex for four nights at $8,000 per to a law firm that plans to use it for clients and advertising. She normally parks between 17 and 22 cars in her yard for Packers games at $50 a spot, but she’s not doing it for the draft because “I want to experience it all,” she said.
As for the week before the draft, the other half of Jacques’ duplex was still available for $3,000 a night.
“It’s bigger than a Packer game, it’s bigger than a playoff game, it’s bigger than anything we’ve ever had in Green Bay,” Jacques said. “People should embrace it and be proud that we’re having the NFL draft right here in our backyard.”
Or in her case, right in the front yard.
