Somebody else will be sitting with Mike Tomlin at next year’s pre-draft media session. Kevin Colbert’s work here is nearly finished.
Those two men are about to conduct their 16th and final draft together.
How do you think they did?
If the draft is the Steelers’ lifeblood, their primary means of procuring talent, what kind of grade would you put on the Tomlin-Colbert duo specific to that task?
It’s a complicated assessment because it’s too soon to fairly appraise the past two drafts, and the one Thursday might be the most important of the Tomlin-Colbert era. The two must decide whether to draft a potential franchise quarterback or eschew all available candidates, and they will be judged accordingly either way.
Can you imagine if they pass on Kenny Pickett at No. 20, and he turns out to be a star? Or they trade up for Malik Willis and he becomes a star?
You can’t deliver a fair grade before the final exam, but let’s go with what we have. Let’s take a hard look at the first 13 Tomlin-Colbert drafts. We’ll leave the last two alone for now, although trading up for Devin Bush has the look of a failed mission.
The first Tomlin-Colbert effort was great, netting Lawrence Timmons and Lamar Woodley with the first two picks and William Gay in the fifth round.
Never forget that Woodley had 11 sacks in eight playoff games, a better per-game average than Lawrence Taylor, Aaron Donald, Reggie White, Bruce Smith, James Harrison, Von Miller and anybody else I could find. Woodley literally is one of the greatest postseason pass rushers of all time.
Anyway, the next two drafts (2008, ’09) were stinkers — unless you’re a big Mike Humpal fan — which brings us to the 2010s.
One of the important factors in judging the Steelers from that time is their annually low draft position. Which is to say it’s harder to get good players when you’re not the Browns or Bengals, and yet, the Steelers outdid those two teams and most others.
Luckily, a site called footballoutsiders.com did the heavy lifting on draft appraisal in the 2010s. It measured draft capital versus draft return and ranked the Steelers as the NFL’s fourth-best drafting team between 2010-2019, behind only Seattle, Green Bay and Dallas.
However, that does not tell the whole story. Things got worse as the decade wore on. In the final five years (2015-19), the Steelers ranked just 13th in drafting efficiency, despite making an all-time great pick in T.J. Watt at 30th overall in 2017.
The 2010s began with an A-plus effort, netting Maurkice Pouncey, Antonio Brown (sixth round), Emmanuel Sanders and Jason Worilds. The Steelers remained fairly consistent before hitting icebergs in 2016 and ’18 — two horrendous drafts that reverberate still.
Everybody from 2016, notably first-rounder Artie Burns, is gone. That draft produced one bona fide starter in Javon Hargrave, and Colbert himself said Monday that any good draft has to produce three starters.
The ’18 draft was even worse, in my book, because the Steelers failed to find a high-impact starter and actually traded up to take Mason Rudolph with the 76th pick, thereby passing up the chance to take stud tackle Orlando Brown Jr. or tight end Mark Andrews, among others. Their best thinking made them chase Rudolph as Ben Roethlisberger’s future replacement and then tell the world they had a first-round grade on him.
Roethlisberger provided the best critique of that pick, telling 93.7 The Fan at the time, “I just don’t know how (Rudolph) backing up or being the third guy helps us win now. But that’s not my decision to make. That’s on the coaches and the GM and the owner and those kinds of things. If they feel he can help our team, so be it, but I was a little surprised.”
The other 2018 picks were Terrell Edmunds, James Washington, Chuks Okorafor, Marcus Allen, Jaylen Samuels and Joshua Frazier. All could easily be gone by now, just like the ’16 disaster.
The Steelers were perfectly willing to let Edmunds go this offseason, but none of the other 31 teams wanted him even for a pittance, so he came back on a one-year, $2.5 million deal. They might chase the safety position in the draft. Nobody seems to know why they gave Okorafor a new deal that included a $9.25 million signing bonus, but at least they can get out of it with minimal pain — and they could easily chase that position, too.
The jury is out on what has transpired since. Last year’s draft appears to have produced several starters and already a few high-impact ones in Najee Harris and Pat Freiermuth (although the Steelers passed on a possible generational center in Creed Humphrey to take Freiermuth and wound up with Kendrick Green).
All in all, I’d give the Tomlin-Colbert drafts something in the B to low-B range. Better than most, but far from perfect.
That could change, for better or worse, with the final exam.
Joe Starkey: jstarkey@post-gazette.com and Twitter @joestarkey1. Joe Starkey can be heard on the “Cook and Joe” show weekdays from 10 a.m. to 2 p.m. on 93.7 The Fan.
First Published: April 27, 2022, 1:47 p.m.
Updated: April 27, 2022, 1:50 p.m.
