Many of you probably already knew that the Pittsburgh Steelers did away with mocking the first round of the draft several years ago and now choose to mock themselves instead. General manager Kevin Colbert was asked to explain the process following the draft in an interview with David Todd on ESPN 970.
“About five years ago we did away with really the mock scenarios, because it was an endless exhibition of the possibilities and what ifs, and we really didn\’t want to deal with that, said Colbert. “So what we started to do was we just mocked ourselves and said if he we were picking first, who would we take, and if that player is gone, ok, this is what\’s left, who would we take if we were picking second, and so on and so forth.
“So when we go in draft day we had the exact order of how we would take players 1-17 and the only decisions that we have to make are whether we want to trade up or trade down. So those decisions are made ahead of time and that\’s why I always say that draft day, it\’s the final act, but it\’s really already been determined before that.”
Colbert said during his pre draft press conference that they had identified six to eight “special players” in the first round and following the draft, as expected, he said that their first-round draft pick Jarvis Jones was indeed one of those special players that he identified.
“He definitely is one of the guys I talked about the other day as being a special player in this draft,” Colbert said. “He\’s a solid kid, a great player. He was dominant at a major college.”
While we will never really know for certain who the other seven “special players” were that Colbert and the rest of the origination identified, or where specifically Jones ranked on that list, we can only assume that they had him ranked pretty high.
Colbert stated later that they were happy when Jones ran poorly at his pro day, because they knew other teams might drop them down their boards as a result. Hopefully they will now be able to mock the other teams that were ahead of them in the first round in a different way for several years to come for not mocking Jones to themselves in the first round.
Mock on, Kevin.
