(610 Sports) – The NFL Draft is coming to Kansas City next month and it's going to be bigger than ever – Literally.
The NFL is revealing details of the three-day event that will take place in front of Kansas City's Union Station, where draft picks will be announced on the theater stage, the biggest stage in the NFL Draft’s 87-year history.
“It’s tremendous. It’s almost the size of a football field, the theater structure itself,” Katie Keenan, NFL senior director of live event operations, said.
Keenan explained that the structure, which will sit in front of Union Station, would reflect and highlight the design of Kansas City's historical landmark.
Fans attending the event will be allowed on the North Lawn of the WWI Museum and Memorial on a first-come-first-served basis and be standing room only.
“We had to do some additional kind of engineering work to work with the building to make sure that the structure that we wanted to build could actually be built there. But as far as the building itself, I mean, it’s really just a matter of highlighting how beautiful the architecture is. So that’s been much more of an opportunity to us than a challenge,” Keenan said.
“You’ll see the façade of the building on broadcast and on television as really the backdrop of the whole draft and then the space on the interior, where the prospects that are about to be drafted are sitting with their families to wait, is in the kind of main grand plaza of Union Station,” Keenan said.
The area where the prospects and their family will be sitting will be set up to feel like the waiting room of a train station complimenting the ambiance of Union Station.
“You’re rarely put into a building like this.”
“We’ve been in ballrooms or big tents and we try to make them not look like that. Right. But this is the opposite, right? We’ve got this beautiful space and we can just add to it,” Keenan said. “It’s going to be it’s going to look awesome.”
The NFL will begin building the structure at the end of March and it will be built over five weeks.