For the longest time, the Pittsburgh Steelers prided themselves on building through the draft. By selecting young players and molding them into future stars, the team maintained a high level of success through most of the past 25 years.
A part of that success came from identifying quality undrafted rookies.
From a stud like James Harrison to quality starters such as Ramon Foster and Jaylen Warren, this team saw a lot of contributions come from unlikely places. Unfortunately, the end of the Kevin Colbert era came with bad draft classes and horrible undrafted rookie groups.
Part of the reason for the undrafted issues stems from how the team treats those contracts. The rules state that teams are allowed a specific amount of signing bonus money for their entire free agent pool. This should, in theory, limit one team from signing all of the top names.
The league has worked around that by partially guaranteeing portions of salary to lure top names to their team. The Steelers, however, have yet to adopt that principal, leading to below-average undrafted classes that are now failing to even stick through the spring.
The Pittsburgh Steelers have a serious undrafted rookie problem on their hands
I’m not going to act like this team needs to go after the biggest names that fall through the cracks of the draft. It isn’t necessary to find good talent.
By not at least being competitive in their contract structure, the Steelers are narrowing their pool of options. We’ve seen that issue materialize in recent years.
Smaller undrafted pools have become common for the Steelers. This seems to be because the team is acknowledging the lack of talent they are bringing in.
Now, some of these players aren’t even making it to training camp. The Steelers have already cut two of their class in Daylan Carnell and Chamon Metayer.
While banking on undrafted players becoming core members of your team year over year is a stretch, producing better classes with a better hit rate is still a recipe for success in the NFL. The Steelers aren’t putting themselves in a position to find value in UDFA deals.
I had hoped that Omar Khan would have changed this structure to bring back better undrafted free agent options for the team. Instead, he has targeted fewer players each year, and the overall quality of the names being brought in remains mediocre.
It doesn’t seem like things will improve, and outside of the occasional hidden gem, the Steelers seem doomed to continue to waste time on bad undrafted free agent classes.
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