The Pittsburgh Steelers’ inability to extract a renaissance season out of Russell Wilson led to them passing on Shedeur Sanders in the NFL Draft, Sports Illustrated NFL insider Albert Breer believes.
“I think people there would tell you that the Russell Wilson thing undermines so many things in the last month of the season and that a lot of that building really wanted them to go back to Justin Fields,” Breer said on the Bill Simmons Show. “And it was something where Tomlin was kind of, again, all on his own on that one. And I think it’s part of the reason why— Tomlin liked Shedeur going into the draft. But I don’t think Tomlin wanted to press that button again at quarterback after what happened with Russell at the end of the year last year. So there’s some dynamics there where it’s like, there’s some stuff that happened at the end of the year in games, where it was just like, man like if we were just average at that position or we were just running things the way they were supposed to be run, we might have been okay.”
General manager Omar Khan said the board fell the way it did, which allowed the Steelers to wait on a quarterback. The longer that wait went on, it became quite clear the Steelers did not love this quarterback class.
“You never really know. I think we talked about the other day, we’re guessing like everyone else. You just don’t know, and it just sort of fell that way,” Khan said.
Khan added that after the team selected Derrick Harmon, they “got their guy,” and that was not a slight towards Sanders or Jaxson Dart.
It also signalled the team felt comfortable in their standing with Aaron Rodgers. Tomlin said the team had positive conversations with Rodgers, and it certainly seems things are tending towards him joining the Steelers, even over a month later.