It's not as if the Steelers' four picks to this stage of the NFL Draft, at least from the positional perspective, couldn't have been predicted by pretty much everyone across the football world:
1. Troy Fautanu, OT, Washington
2. Zach Frazier, C, West Virginia
3. Roman Wilson, WR, Michigan
4. Payton Wilson, ILB, N.C. State
No surprises. Sub out a name or two up there, maybe squeeze in another wide receiver, and even Mel Kiper's next of kin could've called offensive tackle, center, wide receiver and inside linebacker as the positional priorities within this particular class. In order, no less.
But how that played out, within a possibly -- that's possibly -- new approach to the process, might be most eye-opening.
Prefacing that there's nothing amiss with any of what I'm about to put forth, I'll remind that, when I'd asked Omar Khan earlier in the week if the organizational philosophy's still as simple as best-player-available, as it'd been forever under Kevin Colbert, Khan amended his own stock answer in a way I'd not previously heard: "Yeah, I mean, I think it's the same as it's always been: Take the best player at a needed position."
At a needed position?
Hm. I might be splicing semantics, but good luck Googling precedent for that phrase from anyone on South Water Street ... uh, in my lifetime. Even back when Colbert might as well have been buying billboards along Parkway West to let everyone know he'd take Najee Harris, then again when he'd reach for Kenny Pickett with equal transparency, the best-player-available stance hadn't wavered in the slightest. No amendments. No asterisks of any kind. Not out loud, anyway.
And again, that's fine. There'll be no complaints here, certainly not when, however one chooses to interpret the current approach, it's culled very real results at each stop so far on the best-player-at-a-needed-position tour:
โข Fautanu was the sixth offensive tackle by being taken at No. 20 by the Steelers, a remarkable ratio befitting a potentially historic class at the position. And because of that, plus an unexpected extra few quarterbacks, all of the cornerbacks in a strong class of their own were still available at No. 20 ... and I couldn't be convinced that the Steelers cast so much as a glance in their direction. Khan himself acknowledged being so eager to see Fautanu slide past the Rams at No. 19 that "each of those 10 minutes was the longest minute of my life," and he made no mention of any Plan B if that hadn't occurred.
Translation, as I see it: They were going to get their tackle. If it'd be Fautanu or anyone they'd consider to be comparable, they were going to get their tackle right where they sat.
And they did. A damned good one, too.
Who's officially one of us now, by the way:
.@tFautanu's reaction coming out of the Fort Pitt Tunnel for the first time ๐ pic.twitter.com/BCrLjjUU8t
โ Pittsburgh Steelers (@steelers) April 26, 2024
โข Frazier had been a consensus second-best center in this class, behind only Oregon's Jackson Powers-Johnson. And as it turned out, Powers-Johnson would go to the Raiders at No. 44, and the Steelers would be there waiting at No. 51. Again, no move up or down. They hung tight, very visibly prioritized the position -- with all those snubbed corners and now the wide receivers, too, raining all around them -- to get the center they'd been known to prefer, anyway.
And they did. Another damned good one. Love what I've seen of this young man in every context, but nothing more than his trying to crawl off the field late in West Virginia's game against Baylor in Waco, Texas, aware that an injury timeout would be costly to the Mountaineers.
With a broken bleeping leg:
C Zach Frazierโs season ended vs Baylor in November. He bear crawled and then hobbled off the field on one leg in an attempt to save WVU time.
โ Dominic White (@DomWWhite) February 25, 2024
Tough. https://t.co/oaOi96kQcH pic.twitter.com/H9DgzrO2Um
Asked what Pittsburghers should know about the type of player they're getting, Frazier replied via conference call. "Yep, they're getting a hard worker who's going to give everything that he has to the organization to win football games."
Imagine disputing that.
As young as this offensive line's about to be ... yeah, wow. I won't pretend that'll shape up as a strength in September. Lines can take a long time to find cohesiveness with experienced players, never mind a rookie at one tackle in Fautanu, a second-year starter at the other tackle in Broderick Jones, and now a baby-faced center in the middle. But if the aim was to set a firm foundation, these are seismic steps.
"You know, any great team I've been around, it's always going to start up front," Arthur Smith would say in his first meeting with Pittsburgh reporters since being hired as offensive coordinator in January. "There's obviously so many important pieces, but when you want to play a certain brand of football, a Steelers brand of football, it certainly helps to have the right guys."
Of coming away with Fautanu and Frazier 1-2, Smith lauded, of all things, their experience: "They played a lot of snaps at a high level. And they're not up-and-down players. They're two really physical players who play with high effort, high football IQ. They check a lot of boxes for us."
Back to the pattern:
โข Roman Wilson met that been-known-to-prefer criteria, too, with Mike Tomlin having made no secret of his affinity for the young man back in January at the Senior Bowl in Mobile, Ala. But once more, no move up or down. Just hung tight, very visibly prioritized the next position on the presumed list, and they had the 14th wide receiver taken from a class that experts see as being 20-plus deep in impact types.
Better yet, he profiles as the prototype Diontae Johnson replacement. Few will run routes the way Johnson did/does, but Wilson's not about to get all butterfingery in the biggest settings -- one drop all of last season for Michigan, that on his very first target -- he's not about to make a U-turn after every catch, he's not about to be kept out of an end zone for an entire season, and he's not about to blow off blocking assignments.
This opponent had a family:
Roman Wilson will fit right in with Pittsburgh
โ Warren Sharp (@SharpFootball) April 27, 2024
the anti-Diontae Johnsonpic.twitter.com/V7Yg6CN1xt
"Some of it's hunger and just looking to make the most out of every opportunity," he'd say on his post-selection call. "For someone that's been doubted and someone who just wants to prove everybody wrong."
It'll be asking a ton of two young wide receivers -- Wilson and George Pickens -- to carry that room, and I'll keep pounding the figurative table for more. But with these two alone, plus maybe a blooming Calvin Austin, it sure won't lack for upside.
โข Payton Wilson has one ACL and two knees. Not an ideal match. And that, by all accounts, is the principal reason he fell to late in the third round despite a robustly respected career at N.C. State and scarcely a trace of any physical limitations.
Let's see, for example, if anyone can spot the missing ACL in this clip:
Youโre telling me Payton Wilson was playing like this with one knee???? Letโs get him fully healthy . ๐ฅ pic.twitter.com/wSlpZrxmdf
โ Portersburgh (@PortersBurgh) April 27, 2024
He's really dragging, huh?
"I think when you turn on my tape, you can kinda see that I play with my hair on fire," Wilson would say via conference call. "I think that's truly because of what I've been through. Just really understanding that you can't take this game for granted, because no one in the world knows when that last snap is going to be."
I don't need to expound to anyone who'd be this deep into a football column what an albatross inside linebacker's been, with precious few exceptions, since Ryan Shazier's injury. It seemed to have been solved, in a Band-Aid-ish way, last season before Cole Holcomb and Kwon Alexander -- everyone but Elandon Roberts, essentially -- was wiped out as if by curse. But now there's Wilson and, oh, yeah, Patrick Queen to add uncommon speed to standard run-stopping and ... man, I should stop here, huh?
Nah?
"I looked at what he had on tape, what our scouts thought about him, how we evaluated him against the crowd," Teryl Austin would say of Wilson. "And we went from there, and what we thought was we found ourselves a Steelers football player."
Another pattern. Still not complaining.
โข Thanks for reading.
โข And for listening to this bonus Daily Shot today:
