Detroit has been bidding to host the NFL Draft since 2017, and its football fans have been pining for an NFL contender for generations. They finally have both, and the Motor City, the Lions and the region’s most important businesses are eager to shine in the national spotlight.
When the NFL’s traveling road show draft arrives April 25, Detroit native and billionaire Dan Gilbert expects it will be a victory for the city’s renaissance story decades in the making.
“Detroit’s come such a long way in the last 10 to 12 years,” said Gilbert, founder of NFL sponsor Rocket Mortgage as well as the owner of the Cleveland Cavaliers and broad swaths of prime Detroit real estate that will be a prominent backdrop to the downtown Detroit draft footprint. “It’s a perfect time.”
The draft itself will take place downtown around Campus Martius Park and Hart Plaza. Lions President Rod Wood said the city has grown up since the team first pursued the draft, and the NFL has started to notice the city more. Out of 5,000 downtown hotel rooms, 700 have come online since 2014.
The draft itself will occur in the densest part of downtown Detroit, giving it a look and feel more like Nashville in 2019 than drafts in more open spaces in recent years such as Cleveland (2021), Las Vegas (2022) and Kansas City (2023).
“It’ll be very memorable for being downtown, with some aspects of it that are very Detroit, including the skyline and the riverfront and proximity to Canada,” Wood said.
So far, 300,000 people are registered to attend, and some projections suggest the city will lure between 400,000 and 500,000 fans depending on the weather. Detroit’s relative proximity to other NFL markets — Chicago, Cleveland, Indianapolis, Cincinnati and Pittsburgh are all less than 300 miles away — was a key selling point for the bid.
“Detroit still has an overhang from decades and decades of challenges, and one of our biggest missions is to get Detroit’s reputation back to where it should be,” Gilbert added. “So having people here and experiencing it is such a huge motivating factor for us.”
While the Lions spearheaded the official league process, Gilbert personally lobbied Commissioner Roger Goodell for the draft, knowing his commercial real estate company, Bedrock, and its tenants in downtown, could gain considerably from the exposure.
In a bid to bring city neighborhoods far from downtown into the draft activities, the Gilbert Family Foundation is sponsoring two draft parties, one each on the city’s west side and east side. Attendees can board shuttles from there.
Along with Gilbert’s Rock family of companies, General Motors, Blue Cross Blue Shield of Michigan and Roger Penske have contributed to the draft cause, he said.
An NFL Draft-week VIP event is using Bedrock space, and up to 20,000 Gilbert company employees will be attending draft parties. They’ve encouraged businesses to promote their own events, and are establishing pop-up vendor stalls to diversify the retail along Woodward Avenue.
For NFL marketers, the draft is appealing because it brings together fans of all 32 teams, and without a zero-sum competitive outcome. Optimism is especially high in Detroit, where the Lions last season won their first divisional title since 1993 and last week unveiled new uniforms that should further boost offseason energy.
“It’s awesome,” Wood said. “Obviously it wasn’t known or even necessarily predicted at the time we got the draft awarded, but the timing couldn’t be better for the fan enthusiasm.”
