Pittsburgh is about to host the biggest sporting event it has ever staged, and the spotlight will be enormous. Hundreds of thousands of people, including Mel Kiper Jr., are expected to visit over the three-day NFL Draft, while millions more across the planet are expected to watch on television.
Visit Pittsburgh President and CEO Jerad Bachar said the agency counted 4 billion social media impressions tied to the draft. That is the weight behind a week that turns the city into the center of football conversation, with the pittsburgh steelers and the rest of the region’s sports scene suddenly part of a national audience.
The timing matters because Pittsburgh is not arriving at this moment from a place of triumph. Joe Starkey wrote that the city was not the City of Champions again and not the City of Chumps either, after a stretch in which no Pittsburgh sports team has won a playoff round since 2018. The Penguins’ last postseason breakthrough came that year, when they eliminated the Philadelphia Flyers in six games in the Eastern Conference quarterfinals.
The draft lands after a bruising run for the city’s teams and their fans. On April 4, 2025, a plane flew over PNC Park with a banner that read, “Sell The Team Bob!” and Pirates fans booed owner Bob Nutting and manager Derek Shelton during a 9-4 loss to the New York Yankees. Two days later, the Penguins were eliminated from the playoffs for the third straight year with a 3-1 loss to the Chicago Blackhawks, and Mike Sullivan said afterward, “It was just one of those nights where we didn’t seem to have the energy.”
The Steelers have not escaped the scrutiny either. They signed free-agent defensive backs Juan Thornhill and Darius Slay before this article was written, but they are still coming off a two-touchdown playoff defeat in Baltimore in which the Ravens rushed for nearly 300 yards. Kirk Herbstreit questioned whether the Steelers were quitting on coach Mike Tomlin after that loss, saying, “I don’t see any fight, any pushback. Where the hell is the fight?” and adding, “This is the Pittsburgh Steelers. There’s nothing. They’re just going through the motions.”
That is the tension hanging over a city about to present itself to the football world. Pittsburgh will get the exposure it wanted, but the backdrop is a town whose teams have been booed, bounced and doubted, even as the Steelers still usually make the playoffs without coming close to winning a playoff game in nearly a decade. Starkey put the question simply: “Which Pittsburgh sports team is next to win a championship?”