It seems the same Johnstown types who give us the stock $20 million estimate for economic impact any time some event involving more than 10 people hits our town, have hired out to Pittsburgh to gin up figures for the NFL draft.
And they’ve done a great job of ratcheting up their numbers. During a phone call last night, a friend was proclaiming the estimate he’d heard that 700,000 souls will venture to Pittsburgh for the event. I noted at the time that’s more than twice the declining city’s population, which immediately calls that estimate into question.
Are they sleeping under the city’s many bridges? Are they just day trippers; not the drug users celebrated in the Beatles song Day Trippers? Are the figures a tad inflated, sort of like the price of gasoline?
My Wednesday evening caller didn’t have a dollar figure for economic impact, but a quick internet search today found one source projecting from $120 to $200 million of benefit for the ‘Burgh. An $80 million range suggests an estimate long on guesses and short on data.
I used to cover the NFL draft when I worked at what has become our Johnstown Woke Gazette and later, the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review. I won’t be going to Pittsburgh for this event. If they held it in my backyard, I’d pull down the blinds.
The NFL draft is just another overhyped, overblown example that nothing succeeds like excess.
Said draft begins at 8 p.m. tonight with exactly one round on the docket. Subsequent rounds unfold in coming days. I remember, when the upstart United States Football League arrived in the mid-1980s the NFL began its draft early one day and went continuously through the finish in the wee hours of the next morning, maybe 2 or 3 a.m., as I recall.
This year’s NFL draft unfolds over three days, two of them with primetime starts. Again, nothing succeeds like excess.
New England coach Mike Vrabel reportedly will miss Day 3. He will be having counseling, presumably to prevent him from again canoodling with a married female NFL reporter, who gives new meaning to the term “insider.”
How will the Steelers handle the draft being held in their home city? Hopefully they won’t make as huge an error as in 1983, when they skipped over hometown hero, Pitt quarterback Dan Marino, to take defensive end Gabe Rivera, whose career was ended by a car accident that left him paralyzed early in his rookie year. Rivera was charged with drunken and reckless driving, but the charges were dropped due to him, according to a DA, having suffered enough.
Steelers fans suffered watching Marino have a Hall of Fame career for Miami even as the Steelers continued to struggle to find a replacement for their Hall of Fame quarterback Terry Bradshaw.
Fast-forward to the present and the Steelers and their fans are waiting anxiously to learn if ancient quarterback Aaron Rodgers will break out his walker and attempt yet another season. Some have suggested – heresy – that the Steelers might want to think about drafting a quarterback with an early-round pick.
These people think having a starting quarterback on the verge of qualifying for AARP membership is not the best option.
A side benefit of the NFL draft hysteria in Pittsburgh is that it has taken some of the attention off what is becoming yet another epic collapse by the Penguins in the Stanley Cup playoffs.
Your Penguins find themselves in a 3-0 hole after losing Game 3 in Philadelphia. Typically, the Penguins were whining about the officiating afterward instead of looking in the mirror.
Back to that cell call I got Wednesday night, he had mentioned the Penguins game, ongoing at that time. I told him I hadn’t watched a minute, but, in view of the league’s interest in keeping the Penguins alive, I predicted the Penguins were winning and had at least two power-play goals.
He told me the Penguins were losing, 3-1, so I flipped on the game just in time to see the Penguins close it to 3-2 with, yes, their second power-play goal of the game.
That the Penguins lost is a result of them going just 2-of-5 on those extra-man situations, while the Flyers were 2-for-3.
The refs can give you power-play chances, but they can’t put the puck in the net for you.
I will confess to having expected the Penguins to do better in these playoffs, although I never did buy burgeoning sentiment that this was a team with a good chance to go past the second round.
The reason for that is age is not served in the playoff long run, and Crosby, Malkin and Letang might be looking soon to borrow Rodgers’ walker.
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