Pittsburgh Steelers general manager Kevin Colbert was a guest Tuesday morning on 105 The X Radio and clarified his reasoning as to why the organization is more open to trading down in the first round of the NFL draft than up. His answer was not surprising, but it no way signified that they are guaranteed to move down on Thursday.
“The first thing that you got to do is to look at our own team, and we had significant numbers of departures,” said Colbert. “So, the only way that we can realistically replenish those departures is through the draft. There may still be some free agent signings, talking about unrestricted free agents, but most of these players will come from the draft. So we need a quantity of picks, and the good thing about this draft, is there\’s nice quality available, like I said yesterday, in rounds two through four. So you\’re hesitant to trade away those picks just to move up and get a player in the first round. Again, I know we\’ll get a good player at 17, and I\’d really like to have those picks as we move forward into Friday and Saturday.”
As several of you pointed out in our recent trade down exercise, there are several teams such as the Minnesota Vikings, San Francisco 49ers, Atlanta Falcons and the Miami Dolphins that might be interested in moving up, but it until it happens, it is only speculation.
During his pre draft press conference on Monday, Colbert said that they have identified six to eight special players as first round prospects. In addition to that, he has continued to say that there will be a good player for them on the board at 17 in addition.
So what have we learned out of this? All we know at this point is that they will not move up in round one, but that they are open to acquiring more picks in rounds two through four. It\’s hard to handicap trades it based on that limited information and the same goes for any other year.
