As of Monday afternoon, the clock is ticking to count down to the NFL Draft’s arrival in Pittsburgh.
Officials from the Steelers, Visit Pittsburgh, the city, and Allegheny County celebrated an official kickoff for the draft Monday afternoon with the unveiling of a new digital countdown clock on the Great Lawn near Acrisure Stadium.
Modeled in steel after the city’s bridges and featuring the names of city neighborhoods and high school football programs along its surface, the clock will be visible to anyone passing between the stadium and the river.
Pittsburgh is set to host the event next year from April 23-25. It’s projected to bring thousands upon thousands of visitors to town, and nab economic impacts for the businesses, hotels and other services in the region that may cater to the crowd.
While the kickoff Monday was largely promotional, it marks another stage in the preparation process for the event — which officials themselves are expecting and hoping will flood the city with people.
“This is going to be big. It's going to be packed,” said Pittsburgh Mayor Ed Gainey, who added that he hoped the draft brings a million visitors to the city.
“People are going to be coming from all over the world right here,” he said. “And so when we talk about investments and ability to talk about who we are and why it's good for headquarters and businesses to be able to locate here and run a business, there's no more of a perfect opportunity than the NFL draft.”
During the ceremony Monday, Steelers owner Art Rooney II joked that he’s considering buying a boat to beat traffic during the draft.
“There's going to be so many people around here that I won't be able to get here,” he said, gesturing to the North Shore.
Not everyone can buy a boat to get around town. But it’s still a little too early to firmly discuss transportation and infrastructure improvements in depth in preparation for the draft, according to Gainey and County Executive Sara Innamorato — though discussions are underway.
“We will have a logistic system that allows us to have a delivery pattern that delivers people to the NFL draft and all around,” Gainey said.
Innamorato said the economic impact on our local community is expected to be around $100 million to $200 million.
“We are talking about an event that's bringing hundreds of thousands of people here to our city where they're going to stay at hotel rooms, they're gonna pay taxes, they're going to spend money at small businesses, they're gonna dine out at our restaurants,” she said. “It will be disruptive for the time that the draft is here, but it's to all of our mutual benefit. And this is about creating an event that's good for everyone.”
Some of the prep is already in progress, according to VisitPittsburgh CEO Jerad Bachar. The organization has been meeting with hotels and short-term rental owners to communicate about how to get ready and when most people will be arriving, he said.
“We've been able to do a lot of studies on the hotel patterns, arrival-departure patterns in Detroit and Kansas City, because those are the most similar sized cities to Pittsburgh,” he said. “We’ve been able to collect a lot of data on hotel performance during those periods in both of those cities, so we've been able to summarize what that would look like in Pittsburgh.”
Peak arrival times are typically the Tuesday and Wednesday before the draft, he said, and a lot of the departures are on Friday and Saturday. Saturday is when the event shifts to being more of a local event, he noted.
Marketing is part of the preparations, too — and the clock on the North Shore is part of that, Bachar said. While it’s not actually marking the site of the official draft stage — a location hasn’t been decided yet — the stage is set to be located somewhere in the vicinity of the North Shore.
Further public events associated with the draft likely won’t pop up again until the fall, Bachar said, but planning will continue through the summer on marketing, public safety, and logistics initiatives.
Gainey alluded to more information to come, hinting at the possibility of transportation services that utilize Pittsburgh’s three rivers, like water taxis. But overall, he was especially excited about the potential for the draft to showcase what Pittsburgh can do.
“It says that we're big time players,” he said. “We can play on a national level, a global level, and I'm ready to showcase that we can play on the global level.”
