As the Pittsburgh Steelers were preparing for the 2024 NFL Draft, they put together a big board, as they always do, to be prepared for the many twists and turns that can present themselves throughout the event. Picking at No. 20 overall in the first round, you want at least 20 players that you would be comfortable drafting at that spot to ensure at least one of them is still around when you select. It sounds like Troy Fautanu being available was as much a surprise to the Steelers as it was to the rest of us.
“We were extremely excited that we were able to pick him at 20,” area scout Mark Bruener said via the Softy & Dick show on 950 KJR in Seattle. “We had no inkling he was going to be around at 20.”
But that is where the construction of a big board and doing due diligence on guys that you think will be off the board comes in handy. It allows for the team to be prepared for the possibility of a gift to fall in their lap on draft day. They had him in for a pre-draft visit, and Bruener said in this same interview he “stood on the table” for Fautanu, pushing the Steelers to consider him heavily.
GM Omar Khan told the media following the pick that the Steelers were anxiously awaiting their time to be on the clock as they watched Fautanu continue to fall down the board. They did not expect him to be there and even called him before it was their pick to assuage any fears that someone would leapfrog them via a trade to draft Fautanu out from under them. He was the top-rated player on their board regardless of position.
So how did he fall? There are three major components to that question. For one, there were six quarterbacks that surprisingly came off the board prior to the Steelers’ pick. That helped push everything down the board. There were also five other tackles that were drafted ahead of Fautanu. Perhaps his 6036 height scared some teams off from viewing him as an NFL tackle, and guards typically don’t get selected in the top 15 to 20 picks of the draft. The Steelers do view him as a tackle, and his 34.5-inch arms make up for the slight lack of height.
The final factor was some reports that surfaced in the week leading up to the draft that Fautanu’s injury history could spell trouble for his longevity in the league. With an ACL and Lisfranc injury in his past, it is possible that some teams steered clear to aid his fall down the board.
Softy & Dick jokingly asked Bruener if he planted the information to aid the Steelers’ efforts in landing Fautanu.
“I was in the dark just like you. Dead serious,” Bruener said. “There is a lot of posturing by teams and by media reports, by agents, by other agents. I’m just making this up, maybe there was an agent that recruited him and didn’t get him…there’s a myriad of things. But what you do as a scout is you do your job and you call your contacts to make sure that what you believe that you have in your information is correct.”
Fautanu expressed a similar sentiment in his appearance on Softy & Dick last week.
“The last time I dealt with [my knee] was in 2021,” he said. “But I’ve never missed any games, never missed any practices due to it. So it was kind of random honestly.”
Fautanu also said that he and his agent speculated that a team later in the draft may have leaked information to try to get him to fall. In the end, Fautanu, a noted Steelers fan, was happy things worked out the way they did with him ending up in Pittsburgh. It sounds like the Steelers are equally as excited with the way things went down.
