Tim Benz: Question the Steelers draft strategy if you like, let’s just debate the right things
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For the most part, I liked the Pittsburgh Steelers 2022 draft class and the team’s approach to building it. That’s because while I’m not in the “Kenny Pickett, future Hall of Famer” camp just yet, I do think he’s got the potential to be at least an above-average NFL quarterback. And if the front office thinks he can be even better than that, the pick makes sense.
Especially when he’s the first quarterback off the board in a year when your franchise QB has just retired.
Now, if you are a person who has no faith in Pickett and thinks he’s going to be nothing but a journeyman backup at best, well, then you probably hate the Steelers draft.
Or if you are someone who thinks they didn’t address the team’s defensive needs or offensive line issues enough, you probably aren’t on board either.
That’s fine. That’s what sports talk radio and Twitter are for. That’s why sports arguments are fun to debate.
I just want people who are complaining about the Steelers’ draft decisions to be complaining about the right things … and in the right order. Because I think some criticisms of what general manager Kevin Colbert and coach Mike Tomlin did in their last draft together have become false narratives.
For instance:
• “I like Kenny Pickett, but the Steelers should’ve traded back to get him”: Well, if you like Pickett, just be happy they got him.
If the Steelers are convinced he is a franchise quarterback, then don’t monkey around with trading back.
And they certainly must think that way about Pickett if they bothered to draft him 20th after just signing Mitch Trubisky at the position in March.
If an NFL team thinks it needs a quarterback and the one it likes the most is available on the clock, just take him as opposed to messing around with a fallback trade for the sake of bringing in another nominal draft choice.
How could the Steelers have been sure if they traded back, that some other team who liked Pickett much more than the other quarterbacks wouldn’t have moved up to get him? That could’ve badly backfired, right? I know the theory that the Steelers should’ve waited until Round 2 on Pickett, or that they should’ve traded back to get him, has gained steam because no other quarterbacks went in the first two rounds.
But that’s retrospective analysis. With all the speculation over where and when the likes of Malik Willis, Matt Corral, Sam Howell and Desmond Ridder were going to be selected, there’s no way the Steelers could’ve been certain that if they traded back to draft another positional player, that Pickett (or one of the other quarterbacks that they liked) would’ve been there to select when their turn came around next in Round 2. Colbert, not one to usually be transparent on such matters, admitted his surprise at how the rest of the league appeared to be so lukewarm on the rest of the quarterback class.
“We were (surprised),” Colbert said. “We were just comforted that we had Kenny in the fold. That group is a quality group. I suspect a lot of those players will come away as starters.”
Wanna blame the Steelers for having too high of an evaluation on the QB class as opposed to the rest of the NFL? OK. That may be legit.
But their evaluation of Pickett is obvious. They love him. And for a quarterback, you don’t play the game of trading back. If it’s a safety and you get burned, you just draft your next favorite safety and pretend he was your guy all along. It doesn’t work that way for quarterbacks.
• “If the Steelers knew they were going to draft Kenny Pickett, they never should’ve signed Mitch Trubisky”: But they didn’t know they were going to draft him. That’s impossible. They were just hoping they would draft Pickett. Or one of the other quarterbacks. Obviously, the Steelers had a higher opinion of this QB draft class than most, so they must’ve been thinking that they may not get a shot at either Pickett or Willis at No. 20. So they were signing Trubisky as insurance in case they didn’t get a quarterback they liked, because they see more upside with him than Mason Rudolph.
I get the complaint. But that’s not the right way to look at it. If you want to gripe about the redundancy of having Pickett, Trubisky and Rudolph, I cosign. Your complaining, though, has to match the timeline. The complaint should be that signing Trubisky should’ve taken the prospect of a first-round QB off the table.
That’d be true if they honestly believed all the spin they were leaking out about Trubisky in the first place. But they didn’t.
That was team-friendly media hype carrying water on behalf of the organization over what kind of a diamond-in-the-rough the franchise thought it had found in Trubisky. The reality is that the front office just thinks Trubisky is better than Rudolph. That’s all. And that’s how it always should’ve been portrayed.
The organization just wanted the fan base to talk itself into optimism about Trubisky in case it couldn’t land Pickett, Willis, Ridder, Corral or Howell in the round that they wanted.
Now they’ve got all the quarterback clutter I was predicting months ago. So maybe the most appropriate way of looking at this is, if they were hell-bent on drafting a quarterback, why didn’t they trade Rudolph for a late-round pick before the draft or on the second or third day?
That way, the Steelers could’ve emerged with Pickett, Trubisky and Chris Oladokun, plus another player at a different position of need.
Unless they tried and no one wanted to dance.
• “Why did the Steelers draft a second quarterback in the seventh round? Shouldn’t they have spent that on another position like defensive back or tackle?”: They wanted a fourth arm for practices through camps. They liked Oladokun coming out of South Dakota State. He came in for a visit as a late riser through the draft process.
Maybe he’s the next multi-year Josh Dobbs or Brian St. Pierre. Maybe he can catch on and be ready to be the third guy if a trade for Rudolph or Trubisky is consummated before training camp starts.
Hey, better to be cost-effective with this approach than the notion of bringing a third veteran with NFL experience.
Also, let’s not forget, had it not been for his death last month, the fourth QB would’ve been Dwayne Haskins. Even if the Haskins tragedy hadn’t occurred, between Pickett, Rudolph, Trubisky and Haskins, one of those four was going to be off the team before camp ended, and one of the remaining three was likely to be nothing more than the third QB.
So Oladokun is just absorbing that job. Plus, finding a seventh-round defensive back or offensive tackle contributor is pretty rare. We’re talking about someone between a Tre Norwood and a Kelvin Beachum in an absolute best-case scenario.
Likely someone far less impactful than that.