The NFL Draft is expected to have an economic impact of about $160 million dollars over the course of the three days the event will be in Detroit.

Anderson Economic Group COO Tyler Theile says they came up with the number based on the number of visitors estimated to attend, how long they will stay in town, and how much they will spend.

“That’s something we did for fun in this instance, but since we’ve had the opportunity to complete economic impact analyses on so many other events in the past, especially non-ticketed events where you can’t use a ticket price or a selling price or a quantity of those to estimate visitors, we have a method for doing that, and that’s what we’ve attempted to do here,” Theile said.

Theile says when compiling the report, the Anderson Group looked at hotel capacity, in particular, as well as the number of visitors a sold-out Lions game brings into town.

Finally, they considered how many visitors were generated by previous NFL Draft events.