The Steelers have a “conundrum” on their hands with too many draft picks in Mike McCarthy’s first year as coach. Or, as he called it during the annual league meetings yesterday, a “good problem to have”. Parceled through trade and compensatory picks, the Steelers have 12 draft selections for next month.
Yet to listen to the beat writers, there’s no chance of McCarthy using those 12 draft picks—or even 10. Maybe they feel differently about the roster than he does, but he seems to welcome the potential to add a dozen rookie draft picks to his team.
“You’ve got 12 picks, let’s just try to pick 12 really good football players”, McCarthy said, via the Steelers’ website. “I’m hopeful there’ll be a quarterback at the right time for us to possibly add to our roster. But 12 picks, we’re going to have a heck of a class”.
Of course, McCarthy knows that the more draft picks you have, the better, and the Steelers have more draft capital than they have had in decades. While they have only one pick each in the first and second rounds, they have three third-round picks. And they have another two selections in the fourth round. The final three rounds add another five total draft picks to bring the Steelers’ total to 12.
But is this a roster that could conceivably accommodate 12 rookies? Thus far, the Steelers have retained every draft pick under Omar Khan, though this will be the first year that he works with McCarthy. And they didn’t have anywhere near 12 draft picks for his first three classes.
The draft pick factor is serious to Mike McCarthy, though, recalling his Packers’ Super Bowl win over the Steelers. “You can’t have enough good football players. And winning one Super Bowl and giving the talk that night at the ring ceremony, it took 77 players to win the championship”, he recalled. “The message is, all those young guys that are on the practice squad, you’ll never hear me talk about the 53, I’ll talk about the 68”.
In all, the Packers lost 174 games to players on IR that year. They were players of varying importance, but included Ryan Grant, Morgan Burnett, Jermichael Finley, and Nick Barnett. But they had Aaron Rodgers, which certainly made a difference. If not for the depth of that roster—and of the practice squad—though, would the Packers have made it that far?
Ultimately, how good is this current roster? Are there places where, now under Mike McCarthy, the Steelers could fit 12 rookie draft picks? Even more importantly, could sacrificing one of those draft picks otherwise improve the team?
One notion many wonder about is trading into next year’s draft. If a team offered a 2027 third-round pick for one of the Steelers’ fourth-round draft picks, would Mike McCarthy gladly part with it? Or would they use it to trade up in an earlier round to secure a specific-desired player?