Steelers don't exactly send the house to visit Peter Skoronski at his Pro Day

There are many challenges that come with a busy offseason schedule. At the start of free agency, NFL teams must prioritize their time between making phone calls to available players and hitting the scouting trail. The Pittsburgh Steelers know this as well as anyone.

Not every team sends their head coach and general manager around the country together to hit a string of Pro Days in a short period of time, but the Steelers are one of them. And it doesn't look like things are going to change in the post-Kevin Colbert era.

This week, we saw continued evidence of this. On March 14th, Clemson help their Pro Day and the Steelers had their brass on hand with Mike Tomlin and Omar Khan narrowing in on players like DT Bryan Bresee and LB Trenton Simpson. This Pro Day visit now puts these players squarely on the map for Pittsburgh early in the NFL Draft, if history repeats itself.

The problem is that Tomlin and Khan can't be at multiple places at once. While Clemson's star-studded Pro Day was taking place, offensive line prospect Peter Skoronski was working out at Northwestern's Pro Day.

Unsurprisingly, Northwestern didn't have the reported turnout that Clemson did. The Steelers did still have OL coach Pat Meyer on hand as well as director of player scouting, Mark Sadowski, Bradley Locker confirms. However, that just doesn't have the same feel as when the head coach and general manager are on hand.

Steelers may not be as high on Peter Skoronski as we thought

Obviously, Clemson has significantly more talent than Northwestern, so it wasn't a surprise to see some of the top executives around the league show up at their Pro Day. However, Skoronski is considered a very good prospect in his own right, and I'm not sure exactly what this means for his chances of being drafted by the Steelers.

While many mocks project Skoronski to be off the board by the 17th overall pick, that's certainly not guaranteed to be the case, as his 32 1/4'' arms could force him to play guard at the next level. This may make him far less marketable with an early pick. In addition, it's worth noting that he struggled with power at times and gave up a whopping 26 pressures during his final season at Northwestern.

Now let's look at what history has shown us. In order to become a first-round pick by the Pittsburgh Steelers, you almost have to have either a formal Pro Day visit by the head coach and general manager or you need to, at the very least, have a top 30 pre-draft visit. Since Skoronski missed out on the first, I would expect him to receive the latter.

This is a trend that the Steelers have stuck with every year for the past decade, and they rarely deviate from the script. In 2021, the Steelers sent two personnel members (including their assistant OL coach) to see Creed Humphrey at Oklahoma's Pro Day, but Tomlin and Kolbert were not in attendance. Ultimately, they passed up Humphrey on two occasions in the NFL Draft.

We can't yet scratch Peter Skoronski off as a possible candidate for the Steelers, but only getting Pat Meyer and a scouting director in attendance could be an indication that Pittsburgh believes he will be gone before their pick or that perhaps they don't have quite as much interest as we originally assumed. Stay with us as we monitor every Pro Day visit and in-house meeting by the Steelers throughout the pre-draft process.