With little over a week to go before the draft in Pittsburgh, some media outlets are already throwing out absurd numbers like 700,000 are expected to attend. Actually, given that Goodell, Eisen & Co. repeatedly claimed 600,000, at least 20 times the actual number, were at little Green Bay last year (metro population roughly 330,000), I'm hoping for the one million mark to be claimed for this year's Caste spectacle.
If 700,000 people are going to be smashed together in a small section of downtown Pittsburgh over a three day period, how come 40% of hotel rooms in Allegheny County (Pittsburgh) are still vacant? From an article:
Perry Ivery, the board chair of Visit Pittsburgh and general manager of the 167-room Oaklander Hotel, shared the latest data, which was as of April 1, with KDKA. It showed nearly 60% of the county's roughly 19,000 hotel rooms have been booked for the Thursday, Friday, and Saturday of the draft.
https://www.cbsnews.com/pittsburgh/news/pittsburgh-hotel-availability-nfl-draft-april/
So less than 12,000 hotel rooms have been booked so far. I guess most of the 700,000 have decided to pitch a tent along one of the three rivers, in order to commune with nature and the brigades of homeless people.