5 worst Steelers draft picks of the Kevin Colbert era

The Steelers recently extended Kevin Colbert’s contract. Here are Pittsburgh’s five worst picks since he joined the team back in 2000.

Kevin Colbert, the Steelers Vice-President and General Manager, recently signed a contract extension that will keep him with the team through the 2021 NFL season.  If you missed the announcement, you can read it here from the official website of the Steelers.

While Colbert has resided over NFL drafts that brought us truly stellar players and one recent Hall of Fame inductee in Troy Polamalu, not every draft class under Colbert brought the Steelers quality players. No organization will ‘hit’ on every draft pick in every draft, but the expectation in a seven-round draft, for example, is that you ‘hit’ on the players you draft in the first three or four rounds.

While we have ‘hit’ on several late-round draft picks, such as Brett Keisel, who was drafted in the seventh round of the 2002 NFL draft and Antonio Brown, who was drafted in the sixth round of the 2010 NFL draft, we have ‘missed’ on several players drafted in rounds one through four during Colbert’s tenure as GM.

Any player on whom the Steelers ‘hit’ or ‘miss’ is probably never the fault of one person as I am operating under the assumption that we take a collective approach to the draft.  In other words, decisions about whom to draft are not made in a vacuum, so the speak.

If a player is drafted in the first round and makes the Pro Bowl, for example, the GM would most likely get the credit; conversely, if that same player is not a contributor to the team’s success, the GM would most likely get the blame.

Let’s take a look at the top 5 ‘misses’ from bottom to top during Colbert’s tenure as the Steelers GM.