It seems like more people are getting the memo about the eye-popping but loosey-goosey attendance numbers that emerge from the NFL Draft. That is: They’re not reliable, at least not as we typically understand the word “attendance” in a sports context.
To state it simply, the numbers include duplicates, and not just the possibility that the same person is counted twice. The way the methodology works, the numbers include the same person counted many times. Every time someone passes through security into the draft perimeter, that counts as a tally mark.
In prior drafts, officials on-site tell me privately you’d see the same groups come and go a half-dozen times or more. That’s the nature of the pleasant, festival-like feeling around the draft, where hours might pass between your priority picks and there are multiple points of interest. In Pittsburgh, this methodology seems particularly prone to challenges because there are two different draft zones, which both require security screening.
Visit Pittsburgh projects 500,000 to 700,000 people. Now, look at the hotel data that local CBS affiliate KDKA reported earlier this month: As of April 11, Allegheny County’s 19,000 hotel rooms had just 60% occupancy for the nights of the draft. I admit that draft fans may be a late-planning bunch, but if there were anywhere close to 700,000 individual people coming, you’d expect more stress on those accommodations. (Incidentally, there are still rooms available for Thursday night.)
As I wrote Monday, the NFL doesn’t project an official number, citing the difficulty in predicting attendance to a free event. Attendees are supposed to register with the NFL’s OnePass app, but without a financial transaction, people may decide to come at the last minute or register and then not show.
Also, to the league, it mostly doesn’t matter. The size of the crowd doesn’t meaningfully change the NFL’s economics, and whatever the real number is, it’s still huge.
But that number is important to civic boosters, who use it to justify the expense of the draft, and that’s where these stats get political, and therefore, fair game for rigorous evaluation. Visit Pittsburgh projects $120 million-$213 million in new economic activity based in part on the attendance guess. Also, the politicians won’t ever let methodology get in the way of claiming a “record,” which is probably how the ever-escalating draft attendance numbers got started in the first place. As I wrote last May, two well-placed sources told me they think the 775,000 number pushed out by Michigan politicians in 2024 was more like 450,000-500,000.
Nobody’s trying to say that it won’t be a few big days in the Burgh. It will be one of the city’s largest public gatherings ever. But it seems worth noting that, in reality, we’re probably talking about crowds several times bigger than a sell-out at Acrisure Stadium, not 10- or 11-times larger.
