NFL Draft to be '50 percent virtual and 50 percent in person' in 2021?

The NFL completed the 2020 season on-time and welcomed roughly 25,000 spectators, including 7,500 vaccinated healthcare workers, to the Super Bowl LV matchup between the Tampa Bay Buccaneers and Kansas City Chiefs on Feb. 7. 

The league's next big public event held amid the COVID-19 pandemic will be the NFL Draft set to occur in downtown Cleveland from April 29 through May 1. Pro Football Hall of Fame president David Baker recently spoke with Howard Balzer of SI.com about having a full stadium for the Hall of Fame Game scheduled for Aug. 5. Baker also touched upon this year's draft. 

"I think that'll probably be 50 percent virtual and 50 percent in person," Baker said of the draft. "But I think by the time we get to August, we're gonna be ready to go. The vaccine is picking up, obviously the trend line is in the right direction right now. I think the NFL has a wonderful study that they did with the CDC that basically said that there wasn't one infection that could be traced to the 1.2 million people that went to a game.

"At the Pro Football Hall of Fame, we've got new technology that takes the temperature of as many as 70 people at a time as they go through the Hall. So there's a lot of things we can do. We got a great operational team. We're going to rely very heavily on the experts at the NFL." 

Trying to predict in February if the Dallas Cowboys and Pittsburgh Steelers will even play each other on the first Thursday of August is a silly exercise because so much about what the world will look like by summer remains unknown. The draft, however, isn't that far off. 

Last year's player-selection process was entirely virtual, but the NFL and Cleveland officials continue to move forward as if the city is hosting some football-related festivities in late April. Ahead of Super Bowl LV, NFL commissioner Roger Goodell refused to directly say if fans will have to prove they're vaccinated to attend league-hosted draft events.