NFL draft a big draw, but not a record-setter

With someone walking onstage every few minutes to read a name off a piece of paper, the NFL draft wouldn't seem like a big television draw. Yet the 11.2 million people who watched this year made it the week's second most popular program of the week.

The first round of the draft was shown on Fox, the NFL Network and several ESPN networks simultaneously. This year's assignment of college football players to NFL teams was particularly suspenseful, with a handful of quality quarterbacks in the draft, and little consensus ahead of time over how things were going to go.

Still, the Nielsen company said it wasn't quite as popular as the most-watched draft ever in 2014.