Ray Fittipaldo: A look beyond the smokescreens at Steelers' offseason plan

Ray Fittipaldo, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette on May 4, 2025

Published in Football

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PITTSBURGH — Mike Tomlin is not afraid to put up a smokescreen or two during the pre-draft process to keep the other 31 teams guessing. Remember his flirtation with Malik Willis a few years ago, when he had the football world convinced the Steelers were going to take the quarterback out of Liberty University? Or his willingness last Tuesday to speak at length about Shedeur Sanders?

The Steelers never talk in detail about specific prospects in the lead-up to the draft, but Tomlin made an exception with Sanders, who had been tied to the Steelers for weeks by many of the national draft analysts.

"It's a game to be played," Tomlin said last week before the draft. "It's a competition. It's fun. I think about it on pro days as you guys watch us move, who I interact with, where I go. Sometimes it's real, sometimes it's not. But that's a fun component of the competition. The same could be said about who we bring in on pre-draft visits."

Tomlin is correct. He is capable of deceiving and leading people in one direction while the Steelers are thinking about another way to go, but if you paid close attention to what the Steelers did in the months leading up to the draft, they left plenty of clues about their intent.

The pre-draft visits are important to note. Three of the seven draft picks this year visited the Steelers before the draft, including Derrick Harmon, Kaleb Johnson and Yahya Black. In Omar Khan's three seasons as general manager, 12 of his 21 draft picks came in for visits before the draft.

"It's important to get to know those guys as much as possible and sort out how we would stack those guys and take those guys," Khan said.

The Steelers also left some major clues in how they approached trades and free agency when the new league year began in March. Their first order of business was trading for Seattle receiver DK Metcalf. They gave up their second-round pick and signed him to a $150 million contract, but in Khan's eyes, it was well worth it given the state of their receiving corps in recent years.

Their next biggest investment ($10 million for one year) came with the addition of veteran corner Darius Slay Jr. in free agency. They also signed veteran corner Brandin Echols. In all, they had six corners under contract for the 2025 season before the draft.

The Steelers didn't totally ignore those positions in the scouting process. They still did their due diligence on receiver prospects such as Matthew Golden, Jayden Higgins, Jaylin Noel and others. They also scouted corners Azareye'h Thomas and Trey Amos, but by early March, the Steelers knew they wanted to be proactive with those positions because they didn't like the depth at those positions as much as they did some others.

"When free agency hit, we had had enough time to analyze the draft pool, and we recognized that maybe those were probably good locations to invest in terms of veteran NFL guys, and so that's why we did it," Tomlin said.

That set the stage for the Steelers to eye a few important positions in the draft. They knew it was an unusually deep group of defensive linemen and an equally impressive batch of running backs.

With three of their first four picks, they chose defensive linemen Harmon, Johnson and Black. In between, in the fourth round, they selected outside linebacker Jack Sawyer because the value at that point of the draft was too good to pass up.

"When you start the process, you hope that it's going to work out perfectly for you the way you want it," Khan said. "It just doesn't happen. There are a lot of variables that cause you to have to adjust and you have to be flexible, and you have to be light on your feet. And that's sort of how that process goes.

"You'd love to get X, Y and Z, and sometimes you do, sometimes you don't. The way it worked out this year, it really worked well for us. We got DK when we had the opportunity to trade for him. We were all in on that, and we felt it was important. We're excited to have him here. It just sort of happens that way."

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