The Pittsburgh Steelers are not frequently sellers when it comes to making trades involving personnel. Yet they have traded away three high- to mid-round draft picks on their rookie contracts in just the past 10 months or so.
While the big-ticket item was WR Chase Claypool to the Chicago Bears for the 32nd-overall pick in the 2023 NFL Draft, Peter King believes that Steelers general manager Omar Khan is also to be commended for the deal that he pulled off more recently in sending G Kevin Dotson to the Los Angeles Rams. He writes in his latest Football Morning in America piece:
Omar Khan, the Steelers’ GM, deserves kudos for a trade no one noticed. He dealt center-guard Kevin Dotson, who might not have made Pittsburgh’s 53-man roster, in a draft-pick swap to the Rams…The Rams traded fourth- and fifth-round picks to Pittsburgh, and Pittsburgh traded Dotson plus fifth- and sixth-round picks. That’s a significant swap because—based on an educated guess which picks will be involved in the deal, using where each team picked in 2023—the Steelers get a 44-pick advantage with the swap of the fifth-rounder for LA’s fourth, and a 55-pick advantage with the swap of a Steeler sixth- for a Ram fifth-. Collectively, that’s a 99-pick advantage, or an improvement, collectively, of three rounds in the draft. Those are the moves that can really help a team.
Over time, of course, given that one of those draft picks isn’t even for another year and a half. But there is no harm in accumulating future draft capital on the back of resources that you do not intend to use. It’s no surprise that the Steelers decided to move on from Dotson, though I think that’s partly because they always knew that they would be able to trade him.
After all, Rams general manager Les Snead admitted that they were pursuing him for a while and that they were attempting to trade for him throughout the preseason. He said that the Steelers were holding on to him just to make sure that they were able to get through the preseason healthy, so presumably they knew they had a tentative deal in place on the backburner all along.
And they may have even communicated that to Dotson, either directly or indirectly. Either way, he sensed that a trade was coming. The writing was on the wall since March when the Steelers added a new starter at his position in Isaac Seumalo along with a new backup in Nate Herbig.
Now instead of having an overpaid third-string reserve who can’t play center, they improve their draft positioning over the next two years in the middle rounds. And of course, the better they do and the worse the Rams do, the more valuable the trade will be.
It’s unlikely that the Steelers will finish toward the bottom of the league, nor are the Rams expected to finish near the top. The later will have a hard enough time just escaping their own division with the San Francisco 49ers and the Seattle Seahawks returning as 2022 playoff teams. Who knows what QB Matthew Stafford has left in the tank, and WR Cooper Kupp seems to be dealing with a chronic hamstring issue. They already got their Super Bowl, but they sold the farm for it.
