The NFL Draft is coming to Detroit in less than four months. April 25, 26, 27 next year. I’m not counting down the days. I don’t have to, someone installed a big clock downtown that tells us how much time there’s left before the NFL Draft, it drills down to the minutes if not the seconds.
The NFL Draft is a big deal. This year’s NFL Draft, held in Kansas City, is estimated to have had an economic impact of almost $165 million.
It’s okay if you’re a little puzzled as what the NFL Draft even is. The next Super Bowl will be in Las Vegas in February, and the NFL preseason won’t start until August. So the NFL Draft is not some kind of game, at least not a game played on a field with a “football” that spends most of its time on a player’s arm.
Rather, the NFL Draft is when the teams of the National Football League (NFL) get to pick graduating college football players to add to their rosters. A page on the NFL website gives Terry Bradshaw, Earl Campbell, Andrew Luck and Bruce Smith as examples of NFL superstars who started out as first round picks in the NFL Draft.
Even if I was an avid follower of college football and the NFL, I don’t think I’d care that much about watching the rounds of the draft unfold, though of course I’d read about it on the ESPN website the next day. But to those who care enough about it to come to Detroit and pump money into our economy, thank you.
But… how much will Detroit’s taxpayers subsidize the event? I doubt that kind of information will be on any press release from the NFL. A press release from Ford Field states
“It's another great day in the Detroit region, with the official announcement of dates for the 2024 NFL Draft,” said Claude Molinari, Visit Detroit President and CEO. “Fans locally and across the nation can now mark their calendars and plan their visit for a celebration of football and Detroit hospitality. Planning will intensify and we will continue to collaborate with the City of Detroit, the Detroit Lions, Downtown Detroit Partnership and other key stakeholders to ensure the event creates a beneficial lasting legacy for all members of our community.”
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“Detroiters have shown many times our ability to put on highly successful national events and we will be ready again to welcome the world next April,” said Mike Duggan, City of Detroit Mayor. “Next year's NFL Draft is going be an incredible opportunity for hundreds of thousands of visitors to see the progress our city is making.”
Visitors will “see the progress our city is making.” Huh. That probably means some things are going to get fixed up nice, while the more intractable problems will be swept under the rug, e.g., the homeless will probably get sent somewhere else for the duration.
Detroit’s awful bus system won’t be fixed as part of the preparations for the NFL Draft. To say Detroit’s buses are bad is an understatement. People lose jobs because the bus won’t get people to their jobs on time consistently. People fail to get jobs in the first place because the bus couldn’t get them to the interview on time.
These are not things you need to experience firsthand. Just go to the Rosa Parks Transit Center downtown and talk to a few people. Or don’t even talk to people, just listen and watch. You’ll come away with plenty of horror stories.
Mayor Duggan, a sort of Democrat in a nonpartisan position, is very well aware of the problem. When he was first elected, he went to the transit center, he was furious, promised heads would roll and things would change.
Of course it wasn’t an impromptu visit. The news cameras were ready to record his indignation at this long-standing problem, and his resolve to fix it.
All these years later, the buses are still and problem and people still make impassioned 2-minute speeches about the buses at meetings. Duggan doesn’t care. The people coming here for the NFL Draft will probably rent cars to get from the airport to a hotel downtown, or call an Uber.
But maybe some of those NFL Draft ticket holders, instead of taking freeways like I-94 most of the way, will instead go for leisurely drives on Michigan Avenue. And maybe they’ll notice the damaged canopy over the Rosa Parks Transit Center, and wonder “Is that supposed to be like that?” Duggan might wonder the same thing.
I believe that particular damage to the transit center occurred in July of this year: there were some very strong thunderstorms that month, one of which uprooted a tree on Bagley Avenue. But with the evidence currently available to me, all I can tell you with certainty is that the damage occurred after 2018.
Hey, Mike Duggan, maybe you should get that fixed before the NFL Draft comes here. If you don’t care about the danger to the bus passengers, if you don’t care about the insult to Rosa Parks’s legacy, at least care about what the NFL Draft people will think. How about it, mayor?
My question to those of you who live in Detroit proper or metro Detroit generally, or have been to this city recently: what should Detroit fix before the NFL Draft?