Did Steelers make a mistake moving up to draft Devin Bush in 2019?

Devin Bush has been in the news for all the wrong reasons recently. Did the Steelers make a mistake to move up and draft him in 2019? 

If you have been on Twitter over the past week, it’s been impossible not to notice Steelers linebacker Devin Bush. Unfortunately, Bush has been in the news for all the wrong reasons. After taking a jab at his teammates for using TikTok as ‘grown men’, Bush has been a trending topic and has been firing off opinions, one after another.

Recently, it appears the organization has reached out to the young linebacker – presumably to ask him to dial it back on social media. On Wednesday, Bush once again took to Twitter, vocalizing that he recently got in trouble and that he now gets “2 tweets a day” – a statement he later retracted, saying that he was allowed to tweet two days of the week.

Steelers fans know what it’s like to experience offseason drama, as Antonio Brown and Le’Veon Bell caused quite a commotion a few offseasons back. Obviously, Bush’s antics aren’t anywhere on that spectrum, but his consistent comments on Twitter seem largely unnecessary and they haven’t been met well by fans.

After the front office apparently has him on a Twitter pitch count, we can only hope that Bush won’t be a distraction from the ultimate goal moving forward. It may even be warranted to ask: did the Steelers make a mistake moving up to draft linebacker Devin Bush in 2019?

Did Steelers make a mistake drafting Devin Bush?

The Steelers were in desperate need of a do-it-all linebacker entering the 2019 NFL Draft, and two prospects stood above the rest: LSU’s Devin White and Michigan’s Devin Bush. These two were team leaders and award-winners in college with outstanding track records and phenomenal athletic traits.

With a handful of teams in the market for a quality linebacker, Bush quickly rose up draft boards, and we knew the only way the Steelers were going to get him would be in a trade-up. Ultimately, that’s what the team decided to do – trading the 20th overall pick and their second-rounder to move up to the 10th pick and grab the athletic linebacker.

While Bush has shown plenty of promise in his first 20 NFL starts, his career suffered a setback with an ACL tear after just five games last season, and he will have to show that he hasn’t skipped a beat. Additionally, the offseason antics are becoming a bit of an unwanted distraction. Did the Steelers make the right decision to sacrifice elite draft capital for a linebacker?

As good as Bush could be (and he could be very good), the linebacker position in today’s NFL is less valuable than it has ever been. Teams are passing the ball at an alarming rate; thus minimizing the number of plays a linebacker is involved in. With several very good prospects that would have been on the board with the 20th pick, the Steelers could have gone in a different direction.

I said at the time that, had the Steelers stood pat in the draft, I would have run to the podium for edge defender Montez Sweat. Sweat would have been an understudy to Bud Dupree before taking over opposite of T.J. Watt. Pittsburgh also could have taken tight end, Noah Fant, without a trade-up.

If the team was sold on moving up in the draft, then edge defender Brian Burns currently looks like the better option. Burns has shown a lot of promise early on and plays a more important position.

At the end of the day, I am still a fan of Devin Bush: the player. I had him graded inside my top-10 players in the 2019 NFL Draft, and I think he has a great career ahead of him if he can avoid the distractions. There are a few players that could have potentially been better for the Steelers than Bush, but I wouldn’t label this as a big mistake.