The NFL Draft is coming to Green Bay Wisconsin, the smallest NFL market in the league. Yahoo Sports. 300,000 fans showed up to the NFL draft his year in Kansas City, which is three times the population of Green Bay, the third biggest city in Wisconsin. Green Bay will have two years to prepare for the draft which is scheduled for April of 2025. Traditionally the draft was held in New York but the league has decided to send it to markets that do not have a realistic chance at hosting a Super Bowl.
My Comment:
I don't usually cover sports unless there is a political reason to do so but I will make an exception in this case. As you may know I live in this general area and I will absolutely be effected by this. Indeed, it will be a huge deal for not only Green Bay but all of Wisconsin.
For me personally, I probably won't be attending, since I will probably be working. I've been to Lambeau Field a couple of times and have watched Packer game in person (Brett Favre through five interceptions and lost to the Tampa Bay Bucs). But I am no longer a big fan of football. I might catch a couple of games a season but I don't really watch very often.
Still, I am pretty happy about this. It will be an economic boom for the hotels, restaurants, casinos, shops and stores in Northeast Wisconsin. There will be a lot of temporary workers that will get some money and there will be good opportunities for overtime for regular workers.
I do wonder where they are going to put all these people though. Green Bay and its suburbs probably do not have the hotel capacity to handle 300,000 extra people. If you include the Fox Cities to the south and perhaps Milwaukee and Madison as well? Perhaps it will be fine.
To be fair to Northeast Wisconsin we are able to handle the EAA airshow, AirVenture, in Oshkosh, which is the southernmost of the Fox Cities. That event has 650,000 attendees last year, but there are some caveats to that. EAA has a huge number of people that fly in and camp at Whitman Field and the number is actually lower than 650,000 because it double counts people who show up for more than one day. It's essentially impossible to get a hotel room that week, but I think that means we do have the capacity for the NFL Draft.
There are other complications for this event as well. Though I think we will be able to handle hotel space, I am not sure how we will handle traffic. As someone who has to drive during the extreme traffic during NFL games at Lambeau I-41 and I-43 can barely handle the traffic that 80,000 fans all leaving the stadium at once. I have no idea what is going to happen with the 300,000 people expected for the NFL draft. Since I will probably working that week, I am not looking forward to the absolute mess we will see on our highways.
Weather is going to be a major concern. April in Wisconsin is probably our most unpredictable month. This year we had a week where we had 80 degree temperatures for a few days in a row, but in other years we have gotten two feet of snow. It's not uncommon for it to be cold, wet and miserable when this event happens, which will be interesting to see how the NFL handles it.
Regardless, this is a huge local story for Northeast Wisconsin and I might even blog about it when it happens. Perhaps I should go after all? It might make for a good blog post. Still, it's kind of far away from what I usually cover on this blog...
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