The Pittsburgh Steelers are out of Latrobe and back at the UPMC Rooney Sports Complex, also referred to as the South Side Facility. We are already into the regular season, where everything is magnified and, you know, actually counts. The team is working through the highs and lows and dramas that go through a typical Steelers season.
How are the rookies performing? What about the players that the team signed in free agency? Who is missing time with injuries, and when are they going to be back? What are the coaches saying about what they are going to do this season that might be different from how it was a year ago?
These are the sorts of questions among many others that we have been exploring on a daily basis and will continue to do so. Football has become a year-round pastime and there is always a question to be asked, though there is rarely a concrete answer, as I’ve learned in my years of doing this.
Question: Will the Steelers try to move back into the second round?
General Manager Kevin Colbert made it very clear that one of the Steelers’ typical dealbreakers when it comes to working out trades is when another team asks them to give up a selection higher than the third round. Yesterday, they gave up a second-round pick, but he explained that they felt comfortable making the exception here not just because of the player they were selecting but because they had a high third-round pick as well, and two picks overall on Day Two.
Still, there is good value to be had in the second round, and it’s not a guarantee that the meat of that value will leak into the early selections of round three. The Steelers already showed that they are willing to make a bold move to help their team get better now—that already started in free agency—so is there a possibility they will continue to move up?
Pittsburgh also has a tendency to try to recoup picks that they lost via trade, which we saw a couple of years ago when they made some late trades in August. They would send a couple of players of their own out to get a pick or two back, and have more recently preferred to swap picks as part of deals rather than giving up a selection outright.
One of the interesting things about the second round is the fact that the cornerback and wide receiver positions have hardly been touched. Only one cornerback—DeAndre Baker—and two wide receivers—Marquise Brown and N’Keal Harry—were selected, and they only started going off the board at 25.
The thing is, when such things happen, those positions tend to fly off the board the next round pretty quickly, so if the Steelers want to get a cornerback or wide receiver within the next ‘tier’, then they might not be able to afford to sit tight. They may have to move up again. They still have eight more picks, and may be willing to do it as long as they can keep one of their thirds while using the other to get into the second.
