This decade hasn’t been pretty for the Pittsburgh Steelers. They’ve yet to win a playoff game in the 2020s, and while they still haven’t posted a losing record, the franchise has been stuck in a mediocre rut. Analyst Mike Renner believes their recent draft history is a big part of that problem.
“I did an exercise this week, it’s going up on CBSSports.com later this week, where I ranked all 191 first-round picks from this decade in terms of the best decision to the worst,” Renner said Wednesday on his Pushing the Pile podcast. “The team with the worst draft track record this decade in the first round? It was, bar none, the Pittsburgh Steelers.
“They have not gotten a darn thing out of those guys they’ve taken highly. When you look at this roster, it’s 37-year-old Cam Heyward, 32-year-old T.J. Watt; it’s 30-plus-year-old Jalen Ramsey. They are not a young roster right now…Kevin Colbert, this is basically still his team, and he hasn’t been the GM in four years.”
The Steelers’ first-round picks since 2020, not including this year, are: RB Najee Harris, QB Kenny Pickett, OT Broderick Jones, OT Troy Fautanu, and DL Derrick Harmon. That’s not a pretty list, with more misses than for-sure hits.
Harris was fine in his four seasons in Pittsburgh, rushing for at least 1,000 yards each year. However, he was never a difference-maker, which led the Steelers to let him go after his rookie contract expired.
Pickett is arguably the Steelers’ biggest blunder of this decade. Ben Roethlisberger retired after the 2021 season, and the Steelers decided to take Pickett to replace him. That decision quickly blew up in their faces. He was with the Steelers for only two seasons before they realized he wasn’t going to develop into a franchise quarterback, and the Steelers are still trying to recover from that miss.
Don’t be too quick to blame Omar Khan for the Steelers’ poor first-round picks, either. Colbert was in charge when the Steelers took Harris and Pickett. Some of his first-round picks before that weren’t pretty either.
The Steelers took Terrell Edmunds and Devin Bush in the first round of the 2018 and 2019 drafts, respectively. Neither of them lasted past their rookie deals in Pittsburgh.
Some of the Steelers’ more recent first-round picks have shown more promise. Fautanu came into his own last year after being hurt for almost all of his rookie season. Harmon showed flashes as a rookie.
Khan missed on Jones, but he’s made up for that with some of his later draft picks. That isn’t an excuse. The Steelers need to start hitting on their first-round picks. There’s a lot of value in Day 1 picks. However, players like Fautanu and Harmon can prove Renner wrong. They deserve a little more patience.
