It’s rare to get a straight, transparent answer out of the Kevin Colbert/Mike Tomlin pre-draft press conference. They’re a close-to-the-vest team in general and come draft season, they’re not delving into any specifics. Which hey, that’s a respectful and fair process. One specific Colbert did get into was how the Pittsburgh Steelers conduct their mock drafts.
Maybe they and I aren’t so different after all.
Colbert explained the process in detail.
“We’ll get through the first all the way through a trade down possibility. In the event that we trade down, we’re going to know if we go four spots, do we have four people? So we gotta be prepared to do that before we get into the room. Which we will be.”
If you’re wondering, the Steelers haven’t traded out of the 1st round in 50 years. That doesn’t mean it can’t happen and Colbert gave the standard line of “it’s a possibility” but still, it seems likely.
They’ll do another mock the next day.
“And then what we do is reset our board based on what happened the day before. We’ll reset our board based on what happened the day before. We’ll do it through rounds two and three Friday morning. We’ll do it again Friday evening and then Saturday morning before we get into Saturday just to see how the rest of it may unfold.”
I know none of this is particularly helpful or useful for us on the outside but it’s a cool look behind the veil of how an actual NFL operates. Their mock drafts are set up differently than ours, as they naturally will be, but there’s value in it all the same.
Colbert said it wasn’t about trying to predict what every team is going to do, an impossible and fruitless task according to him, but it helps the team be prepared and never fail to have a plan, no matter how the draft unfolds. That eliminates the anxiety of the process, a questionn Tomlin was later asked, and makes each decision, a calm, informed decision.
