Kansas City, Mo. — Image might not be everything, but for Detroit Mayor Mike Duggan and a number of local organizers, it means plenty for a city that still is trying to overcome a not-so-flattering national perception of being on financial skids with little to offer.
With that in mind and being a year away from Detroit hosting the three-day NFL Draft in 2024 (April 25-27), nearly three dozen city officials — including Duggan, Dave Beachnau, executive director of the Detroit Sports Commission; and David Cowan, chief public spaces officer of the Downtown Detroit Partnership — spent several days in Kansas City exploring the draft that concluded this past weekend, asking questions and taking notes, observing what worked well and what they can tweak.
“Our objective is not to make the most money we can in 72 hours,” Duggan told The Detroit News. “Our objective is to introduce hundreds of thousands of people across America to what’s happening in Detroit today. And way too many people in this country think Detroit is the empty shell that’s in bankruptcy. Nationally, our image is still the city of bankruptcy from 10 years ago.
“We keep making these national rankings as the hottest place to visit, but nothing will turn the corner for us like 400- or 500,000 people going home and saying to their friends and family, ‘You gotta look at this.’”
The NFL Draft is a massively popular, free-admission event that became a happening for cities around the country, like Nashville, Las Vegas and Cleveland, when the NFL unleashed it from New York in 2015 to become a sort of traveling Mardi Gras-like party that has attracted between 300,000 to 600,000 visitors over the three days. It is an opportunity for cities to dress up and show off, not only for the fans who make the trek but for the millions of viewers who watch on television and various platforms.
Duggan estimates the NFL Draft, which he said in some ways feels bigger than a Super Bowl in part because of the three days of draft activity that generate enormous crowds, could mean an economic impact of $150 million to $200 million to the city. Event organizers tout the fact Detroit is within short driving distances of several NFL cities like Chicago, Cincinnati, Cleveland, Indianapolis and Buffalo, among others, which surely makes travel easier whether fans drive or fly.
“With our central location to the various NFL markets that are drivable, that’s going to be pretty impactful,” Beachnau said.
Beachnau arrived in Kansas City on Tuesday as fans, many of them crazily dressed in their team jerseys and colors, began to trickle in with more arriving Wednesday to get ready for the festivities and Day One of the NFL Draft the next day.
Beachnau said of the group’s intentions: “To kick the tires a little bit and get a feel for what’s going on.”
By Thursday, they were cramming local restaurants and the free downtown streetcars. Like the rest of the Detroit officials who visited Kansas City, for some their first NFL Draft experience, while others, like Duggan, had been to Las Vegas in 2022 — after Detroit had been awarded the 2024 draft — and Cleveland in 2021.
Members of the Downtown Detroit Partnership, the Detroit Sports Commission, Visit Detroit, the Detroit police and fire departments, and staffers from the mayor’s office walked the streets of Kansas City. They got the feel of an enormous footprint, with the NFL Fan Experience outside of Union Station on the lawn of the WWI Museum and Liberty Memorial and the stage nestled in that area.
They spoke with their Kansas City counterparts about security measures, traffic routes, transportation and parking and rideshare drop-off and pickup locations, hotels and home rentals, and talked to restaurant owners and local business leaders to get a sense for how the event affects them positively and negatively.
“We got our notes for making this flow,” Cowan said.
Finding a footprint
The general sense among Detroit’s organizers after experiencing Kansas City is that the larger footprint proved tough on fans because of the amount of walking. The walk around the perimeter also was hilly. The promise in Detroit is for a “tighter” space with flat walking surfaces, and they plan to make strong use of “video walls” scattered all around the downtown area for fans to keep tabs of everything going on with the draft.
“They have a totally different concept,” Duggan said of Kansas City. “They basically shut down a park and are using a park, which is one way of doing it. We’re gonna take a public street in the heart of downtown, and we’re gonna hold it on a public street, very much integrated into downtown. It’s gonna be a different experience.”
The heartbeat of the NFL Draft in Detroit will be in the Campus Martius, Cadillac Square footprint and will utilize Woodward Avenue and Hart Plaza. Although the planning details remain fluid as Detroit organizers work with the NFL on logistics and important visuals like the draft stage and red carpet area for the athletes, the objective is to provide the best television angles of Detroit while making the city logistically easy to move around for the hundreds of thousands of visitors.
“Everybody who comes to Detroit who hasn’t been there, says, ‘I can’t believe this. This is nothing like what I expected,’” Duggan said. “And so we see a chance for 400,000 or 500,000 people to come in and give us a chance to defy their expectations. For us, this is an enormous opportunity.”
As far as hotels, the metro Kansas City area reportedly has an estimated 35,000 rooms available while Metro Detroit has 45,000, with approximately 5,000 rooms in the city, with roughly 1,000 more expected to become available in upcoming years.
Beachnau said Detroit meets the NFL requirements for downtown hotel availability and that NFL officials have visited the city to check the hotel situation off the list. The number of hotels within a 20-30-minute drive from Detroit, along with Airbnb options offer substantive options.
It isn’t just the in-person audience the Detroit group hopes to impress, but those watching on television, as well. For the opening round of the NFL Draft last Thursday from Kansas City, 11.29 million viewers watched across ESPN (5.62 million), ABC (4.11 million) and NFL Network (1.56 million), an increase of 13% from last year, according to the NFL. The ESPN broadcast drew 26% more viewers and ABC viewership increased 8% from last year. The combined audience was third highest on record for the first night of the NFL Draft.
While most of the Detroit organizers left Kansas City on Friday, Cowan remained through Saturday to observe how local officials engaged and held the attention of fans through the three days. The centerpiece of the NFL Draft is Thursday night when teams make their first-round player selections. To access all draft events, fans must download the NFL OnePass app and register for the event to get a ticket and show it at the entry gate. There are capacity limits particularly close to the stage.
Duggan and Cowan said Detroit’s NFL Draft footprint will be closer to Nashville in 2019, which set a draft attendance record of an estimated 600,000 over three days.
“But we’re still toying with it,” Cowan said. “The great thing about being a year out is that we’ve got some time settle into what’s going to showcase the city in the best possible way. You’re thinking of everything from the skyline view, the camera angles, to do we have enough spots for beer and food and all the amenities and access points that are going to make this smooth.”
In Kansas City, the band Fall Out Boy performed Thursday night and Mötley Crüe on Friday. Because Day Three of the draft features Rounds 4-7 in a more rapid-fire pace, organizers must get creative to entertain. Kansas City is known for its barbecue, so it hosted the “KC Smoke Show,” a BBQ festival featuring demonstrations with the top pitmasters from the area. There also was a performance by Grammy-winner Thundercat shortly after fans returned following a severe weather evacuation.
“Saturday is really about what is the city doing to really entertain and leave a strong impression before people leave,” Cowan said. “Even though it’s fewer people there for the draft (on Saturday), it’s still got high stakes from a city standpoint, from a downtown standpoint .”
Seeking a ‘snowball effect’
The NFL Draft isn’t the first major event the city has landed recently, but it is one of the most important. Detroit also will play an integral role in wildly popular March Madness next year as host of an NCAA Regional in the men’s basketball tournament March 29-31 at Little Caesars Arena, closely followed by the NFL Draft. It is the three-day draft that city officials believe will help build momentum for events coming to the city, which also has already been awarded the NCAA Final Four in 2027.
Duggan also was quick to point out the Detroit Grand Prix IndyCar event is returning in June to the streets of downtown Detroit from Belle Isle where it moved in 1992, and the WWE SummerSlam will be in Detroit this August at Ford Field, not to mention the PGA Rocket Mortgage Classic, which came to Detroit Golf Club in 2019, is back. All of these events, aside from the potential for Detroit’s professional teams to provide incentive to come to the city, are adding up.
Many in this area remember the seven-year stretch in Metro Detroit that brought the 2004 Ryder Cup and 2008 PGA Championship to Oakland Hills Country Club, the 2005 MLB All-Star game at Comerica Park, Super Bowl XL (2006) as well as the 2009 Final Four and 2010 Frozen Four at Ford Field. On top of that, the Pistons generated excitement playing in consecutive NBA Finals in 2004 and 2005, as did the Red Wings in the Stanley Cup finals in 2008 and 2009. That momentum is what organizers hope the NFL Draft will spark.
“I point back to the early 2000s when we were awarded the Super Bowl, and it just became a snowball effect,” Beachnau said. “We were awarded the Final Four, the Ryder Cup, MLB All-Star game, PGA Championship, and I feel a sense the draft is going to do the same thing for us. But it just feels different this time because the city is in a much better place than it was back in 2006. I think the NFL, the NCAA, they’ve all recognized that. We’ve got a lot of momentum right now, and we’ve got some other things on our on our hit list, so I think we could see a similar run.”
While no two national sporting events are the same, the NFL Draft will provide a blueprint from which organizers can loosely draw in terms of hotel space, road closures, ingress and egress, the general flow of how people move through the city.
“We’ll take a lot of what we’re doing with the draft and bridge it to the Final Four and anything in between that,” Beachnau said. “We’ve been become much more collaborative as a community and as a region as we approach with the strategy.”
The Detroit Sports Organizing Corp. was created six years ago, with major players onboard, including Lions president and CEO Rod Wood, Pistons vice chairman Arn Tellem and NBC sports broadcaster Mike Tirico, who lives in Ann Arbor, among others to help create a strategy for Detroit sporting events. Beachnau believes with all four professional sports teams all playing in Detroit, there’s a synergy there with each team leader supporting the others.
“Because everyone benefits from this at the end of the day,” Beachnau said.
achengelis@detroitnews.com
Twitter: @chengelis