PITTSBURGH (93.7 The Fan) – Players from Penn State, Maryland and Purdue, but the Steelers had a couple of players from Georgia and Wisconsin and it’s not the first time they’ve taken players from either school. What is it about those two schools that makes it a good match for the Steelers?
“Georgia, they won back-to-back national championships and you don’t do that without quality players,” said Steelers head coach Mike Tomlin following the NFL Draft on Saturday. “We aren’t the only ones fishing in that pond. Philadelphia is doing a pretty good job at that.”
“Sometimes a place like Wisconsin, it’s a stylistic match. They do a lot of similar things than we do. It makes it an easy evaluation, less speculation in terms of what they might be able to do in our system of football.”
Tomlin also said of fourth round pick, Wisconsin outside linebacker Nick Herbig, his brother Nate was a free agent signing of the Steelers.
“That guy held down the same position that I watched TJ play at that place. They ask him to do a lot of things. You see them do NFL things-they rush, they drop. It’s fun to watch Wisconsin tape for those reasons.”
Solid Seven
Steelers GM Omar Khan said what you would expect following the conclusion of his first draft-they are better than they were before it started. He said it was awesome and the journey getting here has been great.
“We rolled out selves up, got on the road and did all of the things we needed to do utilize all the opportunities to engage with these young people and get a sense of what they are capable of and how they might fit,” Tomlin said. “When you do a good job of that, it creates weekends like we experienced.”
“We feel good, but the quality of this weekend will be played out over the next three to five years.”
Tomlin said he wasn’t going to make any bold statements about the players they added.
No trade at 32
Khan said they listened to opportunities to trade out of the first pick in the second round. But they just felt better about the opportunity to use the pick on Joey Porter, Junior.
“We had him graded higher than that (32nd overall),” Khan said. “We expected him to go higher than that.
We consider ourselves very fortunate to have had the opportunity to pick him at 32.”
New nickname
After a weekend of making a couple of trades in his first draft, seems there are several nicknames floating around the new general manager. Mike Tomlin’s favorite.
“The Khan artist, I like that,” Tomlin said. “I saw that, it’s a cool nickname.”
“I’ve been called worse,” Khan said. “It’s not my favorite nickname.”