Naomi Girson | opinions editor

As winter turns to spring, students at Duquesne University are warming up and getting ready for the NFL draft. Whether they have tickets or not, it’s coming to them right here in Pittsburgh.

Duquesne announced that they will be holding in-person classes during the NFL draft.

Students are starting to think about what attending in-person classes during the draft means for them.

Vincent D’Acunto and Brady McCall are both freshmen, originally from the North Hills. They both live on campus, but with home close by, they are still on the road sometimes.

With the influx of people weaving into Pittsburgh, they are foreseeing crowded roads and longer ETAs.

“Well, we have to take different routes to get home. It takes longer, and people don’t know how to drive,” McCall said.

“Getting here is gonna be hard.”

“And then Pittsburgh is never known as a good driving city, so that’s gonna be harder,” said D’Acunto.

According to NEXTPittsburgh, the city is renovating more than ever in preparation for the draft.

According to the pair, construction and demolition will be hard to avoid, and the projects have undefined timelines.

“It won’t be ready by the time we graduate,” D’Acunto said.

However, Pittsburgh Downtown Partnership President and CEO Jeremy Waldrup said that the hard deadline for many of these construction projects is in line with when the draft begins, according to CBS News.

They are both football fans, but they have no plans to go to the draft. If they had the choice, they wouldn’t have taken the NFL up on the offer to hold the draft in their hometown.

“[The city] can’t even handle a Pitt Panther football game,” McCall said.

Other students are more concerned about what will happen to locals in the area.

Kayla St. Cin, a senior marketing major, is co-president of the St. Vincent De Paul Duquesne University Chapter. Every Sunday, her club delivers food to people experiencing homelessness Downtown.

“But with the draft, we were wondering what the road closures would look like, how that would affect us at all, and the homeless people,” St. Cin said. “Because I’m assuming the police are going to kick them out to make the city look better.”
 

According to the City of Pittsburgh, the Office of Community Health and Safety are working closely with the Allegheny County Department of Human Services, which are the main coordinators for the unhoused communities in the area.
 

St. Cin knows the draft will affect traffic, and it will be in the North Shore primarily, but she plans to stay out of the way of the hectic festivities.

“In terms of my everyday life, I’m gonna avoid the grocery store like the plague. I’m probably gonna avoid most places like the plague, honestly,” St. Cin said.

She said she felt the city would be ready to handle all the people, citing how the city handled the U.S. Open that came to Pittsburgh in June.

According to the Department of Community and Economic Development, over 200,000 people came to Oakmont Country Club for the 2025 U.S. Open. The NFL Draft is expecting 500,000 to 700,000 visitors from around the country, according to Visit Pittsburgh.

However, St. Cin’s main frustration was lack of communication between the city and the schools in the area, like Duquesne.

“I’m feeling frustrated because, I feel like it’s not communicated as much as it should be, I feel like the city could be reaching out to the schools a bit more,” St. Cin said.

Other students are more optimistic because they tend to stay on campus.

Two freshmen, Mary Maloney, a pharmacy major and Ava Schrecengost, a health sciences major, live on Duquesne’s campus.

Schrecengost has tickets to the three-day event.

Though she admitted her reasoning for going has to do with her boyfriend being a big football fan, she’s excited too, with some reservations.

“I’m nervous about it because of the amount of people. That scares me right now,” Schrecengost said. “It’s just such a big crowd to be there.”

But she knew it was a big deal for both Pittsburgh and her boyfriend, so she ultimately said she feels it will be fine.

“You have to live. You don’t want to miss out on things because you’re worried,” Schrecengost said. “Because there’s always gonna be something going on.”

Maloney thinks that week will be fine. She said that though Pittsburgh isn’t the biggest city, the draft has been held in smaller cities before.

Last year, for example, Green Bay, Wisconsin, held the draft, with a population of 107,395, according to the U.S. Census Bureau. Pittsburgh, in contrast, has a population of 302,971, according to the same data.

Plus, she found it beneficial that more money was going to the city with so many visitors.

“I also think just pouring more money into things that we have here [is good]. Obviously, all those people have to eat somewhere, all those people have to stay somewhere. A lot of that is Pittsburgh locally-owned places and things like that,” Maloney said.

Naomi Girson can be reached at girsonn@duq.edu