Just recently during the 2024 pre-draft press conference with Mike Tomlin and Omar Khan, Tomlin admitted that he participates in some trickery while on the pro day trail, saying that he will talk to certain people he isn’t interested in knowing that the media is watching. It was a light-hearted comment, but he was more or less admitting that he plays the smoke-screen game a bit in those moments.
During the draft party hosted by Cameron Heyward, former Steelers general manager Kevin Colbert appeared as a guest on Heyward’s podcast and was asked about the art of laying smoke screens and leaking information to help achieve a desired outcome.
“Honestly, you may think I’m fibbing, but we never played that game,” Colbert said via Not Just Football on YouTube. “Not once, no. Because I was not very media friendly. I mean, during the season, I never spoke to the media, only because during the season it’s about what we’re doing, who’s playing, and that’s coach’s world…But I never used smoke screens.
“A lot of times what a smoke screen is, it’s an exchange of information with a media person, and it’s like sometimes you’ll get approached – hey, you know what, I can help you with this, but you gotta give me something – and I’m like, thanks, I don’t need the help. So we really didn’t play that game.”
With the longevity of Kevin Colbert, and most of the scouting staff and decision-making apparatus of the team, they were very much an old-school operation in terms of the way they did things. Colbert liked to stay out of the public eye as much as possible, except when absolutely necessary during the draft process. Omar Khan has kind of followed suit in that way of doing things. There are other GMs who have more regular appearances, either through their team’s website or by appearing on programs around the media landscape.
It is nice from a fan’s perspective to get that kind of information more frequently, but it doesn’t necessarily serve the team to be asked any number of questions and have people run with narratives and headlines from something that was said. San Francisco 49ers GM John Lynch comes to mind this offseason as he has constantly been asked about the trade rumors involving his wide receivers. Even with him dismissing trade possibilities, it keeps those stories alive in the news cycle and on the forefront of people’s minds.
“We’d read stuff, we’d just kind of shrug and just say, ‘Okay, we kinda get the game. We gotta trust what we want to do,’ and we never worried about what anyone else was doing,” Colbert said. “We really didn’t, and we would always talk about that in the room. Look, it doesn’t matter what they do, we have to make sure we don’t make mistakes.”
To a certain extent, the Steelers have to pay some attention to what other teams are doing. Especially when it gets close to the draft and teams run through scenarios to best prepare for possible moves up and down the board, or just knowing what to expect if they stay put. But more often than not Colbert did stay put and let the board fall whichever way it was going to.
For Kevin Colbert, what you see is what you get. Khan spent a lot of years under his leadership in the front office and seems to be taking the same approach with a lot of what Colbert said.
