The 1978 NFL Draft was the procedure by which National Football League teams selected amateur college football players. It is officially known as the NFL Annual Player Selection Meeting. The draft was held May 2–3, 1978. The league also held a supplemental draft after the regular draft and before the regular season.

The Tampa Bay Buccaneers had the first pick in the 1978 draft, by virtue of their 2–12 record in 1977. Tampa Bay traded the pick to the Oilers, for tight end Jimmie Giles and the Oilers' first- and second-round picks in the 1978 draft, and their third- and fifth-round picks in 1979.

The National Football League Draft is an annual event in which the National Football League (NFL) teams select eligible college football players and it is their most common source of player recruitment. The basic design of the draft is that each team is given a position in the drafting order in reverse order relative its record in the previous year—the last place gets positioned first. With this position, the team can either select a player or trade their position to another team for other positions, a player, or players, or any combination thereof. After each team had utilized its position in the drafting order, whether by trading it or selecting a player, a round would be complete. Certain aspects of the draft, including team positioning and the number of rounds in the draft, have seen revisions since its first creation in 1936, but the fundamental methodology has remained the same. The original rationale in creating the draft was to increase the competitive parity between the teams as the worst team would, idealistically, have chosen the best player available.