The 2005 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 April 23–24, 2005. The league also held an supplemental draft that year, which was held after the regular draft but before the regular season. The draft took place at the Jacob K. Javits Convention Center in New York City, New York and was televised for the 26th consecutive year on ESPN and ESPN2. The NFL Draft had been held at Madison Square Garden since 1995, but was moved to the Javits Center in 2005. The draft featured the San Francisco 49ers selecting first overall Alex Smith from the University of Utah. Also 4 Auburn University players were drafted in the first round. Thirty-two compensatory selections were distributed amongst fourteen teams, with the Philadelphia Eagles and the St. Louis Rams garnering the most with four picks each. Three of the first five picks were running backs, an NFL Draft first. The 255 players chosen in the draft were composed of:

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.

The 2005 NFL season was the 86th regular season of the National Football League.

With the New England Patriots as the defending league champions, regular season play was held from September 8, 2005 to January 1, 2006. The regular season also saw the first ever regular season game played outside the United States, as well as the New Orleans Saints being forced to play elsewhere due to damage to the Superdome and the entire New Orleans area by Hurricane Katrina.

The playoffs began on January 7. New England was eliminated in the Divisional Playoff Round, and eventually the NFL title was won by the Pittsburgh Steelers, who defeated the Seattle Seahawks 21–10 in Super Bowl XL at Ford Field in Detroit, Michigan on February 5 for their fifth Super Bowl win.

The season formally concluded with the Pro Bowl, the league's all-star game, at Aloha Stadium in Honolulu, Hawaii on February 12.

This marked the final season that ABC held the rights to televise Monday Night Football after thirty-six years of airing the series. When the TV contracts were renewed near the end of the season, the rights to broadcast Monday Night Football were awarded to Disney-owned corporate sibling ESPN. NBC bought the right to televise Sunday Night Football, marking the first time that the network broadcast NFL games since Super Bowl XXXII in 1998. Meanwhile, CBS and Fox renewed their television contracts to the American Football Conference and the National Football Conference packages, respectively.

Aaron Charles Rodgers (born December 2, 1983) is an American football quarterback for the Green Bay Packers of the National Football League (NFL). He was selected in the first round (24th overall) of the 2005 NFL Draft by the Packers. Rodgers played college football at the University of California, Berkeley, where he set several California Golden Bears records, including lowest interception rate at 1.43%.

Professionally, Rodgers is the NFL's all-time career leader in passer rating during both the regular season with a rating of 104.1, and the post-season with a rating of 105.5 – among passers with at least 1,500 and 150 pass attempts respectively. He also holds the league's lowest career pass interception percentage for quarterbacks during the regular season with a percentage of 1.80%, and the single season passer rating record of 122.5. Rodgers led the Green Bay Packers to win Super Bowl XLV and was named Super Bowl MVP. As a result, he was named Associated Press Athlete of the Year in 2011.

Benjamin Todd "Ben" Roethlisberger (pronounced /ˈrɒθlɨsbɜrɡər/; born March 2, 1982), nicknamed Big Ben, is an American football quarterback for the Pittsburgh Steelers of the National Football League. He was drafted by the Steelers in the first round (11th overall) in the 2004 NFL Draft. He played college football at Miami University.

Roethlisberger earned the AP NFL Offensive Rookie of the Year Award in 2004 and his first Pro Bowl selection in 2007. He became the youngest Super Bowl-winning quarterback in NFL history, helping lead the Steelers, in his second professional season, to a 21–10 victory over the Seattle Seahawks in Super Bowl XL at the age of 23. Roethlisberger led the Steelers to a second Super Bowl title in four seasons as they defeated the Arizona Cardinals in Super Bowl XLIII, 27–23, after completing a game-winning touchdown pass to Santonio Holmes in the final 35 seconds.

Roethlisberger has been one of the most efficient passers in NFL history. He currently ranks 10th all-time in NFL passer rating (92.9), 5th in yards per attempt (8.06), and 11th in completion percentage (63.24%) among quarterbacks with a minimum of 1,500 career attempts. He has the fourth highest career winning percentage (.710) as a starter in the regular season among quarterbacks with a minimum of 100 starts.