PHOTO: SHUTTERSTOCK

It is, frankly, a little weird how many people will show up to watch the NFL draft.

Granted, we’re a football-obsessed culture; the NFL remains the most popular sports league in the nation, and fans are starved for content between the Super Bowl and the opening of training camp (another thing that attracts far more fans than it has any right to). Still, though, try explaining the concept to someone who doesn’t know about America’s love of the gridiron: tens of thousands of people turn up and stand outside to watch various officials announce the names of players who may or may not matter at some point in the future.

That’s weird.

But it’s undoubtedly popular. The draft began as a meeting of owners; even as it morphed into a televised event, it was held at a variety of New York venues with little public fanfare for much of the 20th century. Then, in 2015, the league began turning the draft into a road show, allowing host cities to erect great big soundstages where young players can wave appreciatively to the crowd and hoist jerseys.

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Detroit just hosted its first draft, welcoming a staggering 775,000-plus fans over the course of the weekend. Tiny Green Bay — a town that, to my knowledge, is a football stadium and a handful of football-adjacent revenue sources — will host next year.

Green Bay? Detroit? Even Cleveland, who hosted in 2021? C’mon, yinz guys: We can do that.

Rumblings have begun that Pittsburgh is due a draft, reflecting our status as a positively pigskin-mad metro area (that, due to the icky nature of our early Februarys, is unlikely to ever host a Super Bowl).

There’s an issue, though: We don’t have anywhere to put hundreds of thousands of people. As you may have noticed, we’re a fairly compact city; we get a lot of use out of relatively little space. At least in the immediate Downtown area, I can’t think of a patch of land big enough to host a draft the way that Detroit did.

We’ll have to get creative. Here are five pitches that absolutely would work (albeit at astronomical expense).

Sandcastle

First, you drain the wave pool — it’s 20,000 square feet, so that’s at least 20,000 people, by my very rough estimate of the general size of a human being. If you fill in the rest of the park with people, I’m sure you can get some handsome numbers. Here’s the kicker, though: You have all the potential draft picks float around the lazy river until they get called. The relaxing float will help calm their nerves!

Brunot Island

The forgotten island in the Ohio may be home to a power plant, but we can put a power plant any old place. Let’s turn the whole thing into a riverbound selection center. After the draft, we can convert it into an amphitheater so we don’t have to drive out to Burgettstown anymore! Admittedly, the fact that there are no roads to Brunot Island will make it a bit tricky, but I have that figured out, too: Several thousand new water taxis.

The Empty Footprint of Century III Mall

It’s not like we have any better ideas for it.

Outside the Giant Eagle at Parkway Center

Nowhere — and I mean nowhere — in town is this close to Downtown with this much parking and a dedicated highway exit. Will it disrupt shopping habits for those in the immediate area? Yes — but think of how many cheese trays and cases of beer they’ll sell to the fans!

The Entirety of Downtown Pittsburgh

Okay, bear with me. First, we convert one of the Mount Washington overlooks into the draft stage — but we make it MUCH bigger. (Yes, this will require billions of dollars of near-impossible engineering, but we’re dreaming big, here.) We replace the weird billboard with a jumbotron. Then, we distribute the fans throughout the city. Thousands in Point State Park, more on every conceivable rooftop — we close down the bridges spanning the Mon and put fans there. Everyone gazes up at the giant draft on the mountain. Would this make the whole thing feel even more like the beginning of “The Hunger Games” than it already does? Yes. But think of the television ratings!