On April 23, 42,000 people watched Draft Night Live on X, second only to Pat McAfee’s show, broadcasting simultaneously on the same platform. Interestingly enough, EssentiallySports had been building towards this achievement for the past fifteen Tuesdays.

Every Tuesday from January through April, Tim Wood, our NFL Editor-in-Chief, hosted DraftCast alongside Tony Pauline. Pauline runs DraftAnalyst.com, which scouts and front office staff across the league have read for over two decades, and has been evaluating draft prospects since the late 1990s. He had film on most of the 2026 class going back three years, before some of them had anything resembling a highlight reel. 

Coming back to Draft Cast, each of its episodes worked through position groups, team needs, and board movement. Fifteen episodes, every Tuesday, and an increasing number of viewers tuning in each week with better questions than the week before.

Moreover, those episodes fed directly into the NFL newsletters. The same week each DraftCast aired, Luke Hubbard and Daniel Rios turned the key takes into a DraftCast Edition. By the time Round 1 started, the people watching Draft Night Live were way past learning about the players. Instead, they’d been arguing about these picks for weeks. 

“Not me already knowing every pick before they announced it bc of these guys 😭”, wrote one viewer in the Draft Night Live comments on X. Seeing comments like that come in during the broadcast, everyone at ES watching quietly felt like they’d actually given the fans something real.

The broadcast itself ran four hours out of Pittsburgh, Wood and Pauline at the desk alongside television analyst Jason LaCanfora and former college quarterback Max Browne. Also, Pat Leonard of the New York Daily News had joined earlier in the cycle for a mock draft podcast. 

While Pittsburgh called picks, we had people in four other cities, each one chosen for a reason. VJ Husky was in Las Vegas, where the Raiders’ fanbase had been tracking the board all spring, and their pick carried the weight of a franchise trying to prove something. 

Keith McFersonson was at a bar in New York where Jets and Giants fans, two fanbases with real stakes across multiple rounds, were working through picks in real time. Moreover, Tyler Vasquez was in Arizona for the Cardinals’ selection. And while Angel Massa was in Nashville following the Titans, Dave Ribero reported from the floor of the venue in Pittsburgh itself.

Jason Kabinda, who played in the NFL, moved between the pre-show and the main desk throughout the night. To top it all off, Mike Singletary joined the Pittsburgh desk. Singletary played middle linebacker for the Chicago Bears for twelve seasons, won the Super Bowl in 1985, was named NFL Defensive Player of the Year in both 1985 and 1988, and was inducted into the Pro Football Hall of Fame in 1998. His #50 is retired in Chicago. By most accounts, he’s one of two or three players who defined what the position looks like.

Day 2 and Day 3 came through the newsletter. Hubbard and Rios covered every pick until Round 3 was done, which put EssentiallySports on record for the entire draft, start to finish, three days, five cities.

The final DraftCast Edition ran on April 25. The fifteenth since January.