Thanks to the internet, people like me can sit in their mother’s basement wearing nothing but underwear and write mock draft after mock draft for the world to see. In addition, the major media draftniks and analyst churn out these round by round predictions as well. So does Pittsburgh Steelers general manager Kevin Colbert pay attention to these mock drafts, or does he simply ignore them?
“You do notice them. You can’t help but notice the mock drafts, because they’re on every prominent website that you go to for news,” Colbert said on the Monday edition of The Mark Kaboly Show. “You basically see in any given draft, people talking about usually 20-25 guys and you know there’s a lot of airtime for that group of players. And it’s interesting if you see a name that’s outside of that group. I mean you’ve evaluated them, it’s not like you don’t know people, but you see people getting mentioned. Those folks are getting that information from somewhere, so maybe there’s something to lead you to believe, even though you don’t like them, that maybe somebody else does, which may or may not influence whether you’ll have them available to you when you pick.”
Colbert’s response is probably not that earth shattering, but it’s interesting to hear him say why he would tend to pay a little bit of attention to them.
Colbert has said in the past that while they used to mock what other teams would do leading up to the draft, they now mock for only themselves. With that being said, he said Monday that this draft was certainly different.
“I think this draft was unique with the talent level as deep as it was,” said Colbert “We didn’t find people reaching for players from outside of even our own evaluations. You know that’s unusual. Most times, everybody has their board to the way they like it, but this draft, I think everybody had a lot of the same ratings on more players than they had in the past, because there were so many to pick from.”
