PITTSBURGH — The Las Vegas Raiders selected Fernando Mendoza, an M.B.A. student at Indiana University, with the first overall pick of the N.F.L. draft in April in Pittsburgh. Mendoza will join the Raiders as their new quarterback.

The opening selection was announced by the league's commissioner from a one-and-a-half-million-pound stage built outside the city's football stadium. The event drew hundreds of thousands of attendees in person and was broadcast simultaneously, in prime time and in two languages, across four television networks, averaging thirteen million viewers.

The crowd was predominantly men, most clad in team jerseys, with some drinking twenty-dollar beers and others wearing masks, makeup, and armored chest plates. A middle-aged Iowan who introduced himself as Baron Raider had painted his face to resemble a skeleton and wore a black top hat and plastic bone necklaces. Baron Raider said his getup was inspired by Baron Samedi, a vodou spirit who digs graves, and that he hoped Mendoza would help the Raiders figuratively dig graves for their opponents.

The N.F.L. draft consists of seven rounds in which teams take turns selecting college players, with the order determined by the previous season's record and the worst teams selecting first. The draft was introduced as the first step toward competitive parity, a goal also served by the league's capped team payrolls and shared revenue. The draft is the most cost-effective way for teams to acquire new players; this year's Super Bowl champions, the Seattle Seahawks, started two key players who were drafted last spring.

Earlier draft picks are correlated, in the aggregate, with better N.F.L. career outcomes. According to a study by economists at the University of Chicago, however, the likelihood of a player having a better N.F.L. career than the next draftee at the same position is essentially 50%.

A class of media analysts known as draftniks produces player rankings and mock drafts for outlets including ESPN, NBC, The Athletic, Draft Diamonds, Draft Nerds, and DraftNasty, with the first mock drafts published just after the previous year's real draft ends. Fans post draft predictions on Reddit for the first round or for all two hundred and fifty-seven picks, and some websites offer simulators that let users draft against computerized opponents.

A wide receiver from John Carroll University, a Division III school that had not had a player drafted in thirty-five years, was among the later selections. The final pick of the 1991 N.F.L. draft is known as Mr. Irrelevant.