When drafting in the later rounds of the NFL Draft, you often are looking to take shots on upside, opting to take a player who is raw regarding his development but possesses a lot of potential or taking a risk on a player with an injury history in hopes of hitting a home run and landing a steal relative to his draft position.
Alex Ballentine of Bleacher Report recently named six rookies who look like draft day steals during OTAs, and cited Pittsburgh Steelers CB Cory Trice Jr. as one rookie who has been consistently turning heads in his first couple weeks with the team.
“Eyes are going to naturally gravitate toward Joey Porter Jr. in Pittsburgh, Ballantine wrote. “The second-round pick and son of former Steelers great Joey Porter has a lot of reasons to generate hype. But seventh-round pick Cory Trice is garnering some attention for himself too. The 6’3″, 206-pound is showing off the best parts of his scouting report. Bleacher Report’s Cory Giddings noted Trice, ‘has good ball skills to locate and track the ball, while showing to be a great reactive defender when playing the ball.’ If he continues to do that, he’ll be a no-brainer to make the roster and become a tremendous value as a seventh-round pick.”
Trice was seen as a Late Day Two/Early Day Three prospect by many draft analysts. He fell due to his medical history, including a torn ACL in October of 2021, a high ankle injury suffered earlier in the same year, and a broken ankle during his senior year of high school.
This caused Trice to fall to the bottom of the seventh round with Pittsburgh scooping him up before falling out of the draft altogether, taking him with the 241st overall pick. Still, Trice has the physical tools and the play style to represent himself well in the league, possessing the height, length, speed, and physicality to make life hard on receivers due to the ground he can cover and the problems he can create at the catch point.
Trice has been performing far better than a seventh-round pick thus far in OTAs, impressing teammates like CB Levi Wallace and S Damontae Kazee by racking up pass deflections while intercepting passes as well.
Should the medical issues be a thing of the past, which appears to be the case as we sit here today, according to our medical expert Dr. Melanie Friedlander, Trice should secure a roster spot on the 53-man roster out of training camp and push for playing time in Pittsburgh’s sub packages with Wallace and Porter representing a heck of a steal for the Steelers at the end of the draft.
