Early on Thursday morning, Gerry Dulac of the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette reported that the Pittsburgh Steelers had officially submitted a bid to host the 2026 or 2027 NFL Draft. This came after a report earlier in the month that the NFL had sent scouts to the city to vet the viability of Pittsburgh hosting the event.
Cameron Heyward spoke to the media before practice on Thursday and was asked about the possibility of Pittsburgh playing host to one of football’s biggest events.
“That’d be awesome,” Heyward said via a quote posted by ESPN’s Brooke Pryor on X. “Everybody else has gotten it. Everybody’s had a whack at it. I don’t know if we’re going to be getting any Super Bowls anytime soon, but I would love to see all our Steeler fans be able to pack the house for a draft, and I think it would do so much for the city.”
The draft was held annually in New York City from 1965-2013. In 2014, the league they started to move it to different markets each season. The draft has gone to Chicago, Philadelphia, Dallas, Nashville, Cleveland, Las Vegas, and Kansas City. Pittsburgh believes it is its turn for the event.
Here is the attendance at each of the last nine drafts, per Front Office Sports on X. Nashville, Tenn., holds the record for the most fans in attendance. The NFL held the event on Broadway, the famous street on Nashville known for tourism, country music, and honkytonks.
For reference, there were about 75,000 fans in attendance at the record-breaking Taylor Swift concert at Acrisure Stadium in June. That event stressed the traffic and infrastructure of the city, but the draft tends to have well over 100,000 fans in attendance. It would be an economic boon for the city and give Steeler Nation a chance to show up on national television to support their team. Showering NFL commissioner Roger Goodell with boos has become a tradition at the NFL Draft each year. One would think those boos would be just a notch higher in Pittsburgh.
