How are we feeling, Steelers Nation?
The 2026 NFL Draft has come and gone. In many ways, the draft was a massive success. The city of Pittsburgh broke the NFL Draft attendance record — previously set by Detroit in 2024 — with a whopping 805,000 people in attendance over the weekend. The Steelers made 10 picks in total, filling several positions of need.
But take a scroll through our website’s comment section, social media, or have a chat with Yinzers at your favorite local sports bar, and you’ll get
wildly different opinions on the Black and Gold’s draft class. Heck, check out our staff’s grades on some of the different individual selections made, and you’ll see a microcosm of how polarizing the Steelers approach was.
Personally, I’d like to think that I (Ryan) tend to keep an even keel when analyzing anything the Steelers do. I’m not afraid to call out what I perceive as mistakes, but I also rarely adopt a “the sky is falling” attitude, especially regarding transactions. More importantly, I acknowledge that football can make our strongest-held opinions look foolish with time. Call me an optimistic pessimist, if you will.
With such varying opinions on this class, I thought it would be a useful exercise to talk through the narratives surrounding the Steelers’ draft. While I have my own thoughts and opinions that I will argue in this exercise, I will also provide the case for the opposite opinion, whether that’s making the argument against myself or inviting a fellow BTSC writer to do so. I have a lot of thoughts — and let’s be real, this first article won’t exactly be “short” — so I plan to break this exploration up into at least two separate posts, if not more.
For this article, I’m tabbing Joey Bray to make the argument against the Iheanachor pick.
But enough blathering, let’s start at the beginning.
Max Iheanachor, a draft lemon or a serendipitous selection?
PRO: Truthfully, I may have been one of the few Steelers fans who were jumping for joy with this pick. To set the scene, I was in the breakroom at my day job when the Eagles trade happened. As the green graphic flashed on the television, I turned to our sports anchor — I work at a TV news station in Seattle — and said: “I actually hope this is the Eagles leaping us for Makai Lemon and not for a tackle.” When the Steelers’ pick finally came down and was announced as Max Iheanachor, I jumped out of my seat and gave some vigorous high-fives to my amused and somewhat befuddled coworker.
Anybody who’s been following my contributions to BTSC’s draft coverage knows that Iheanachor was a prospect near the top of my board, including mocking him to the Steelers on a Mock Draft Monday entry on March 2 and including him in my Draft Gem series, even though I acknowledged he was likely to be a first-round pick.
My enthusiasm was certainly not universally shared, however, even among the BTSC staff.
A lot of the negative reaction seems to revolve around the optics of not only getting leapfrogged for the pick, but that the Steelers were on the phone with Lemon when the Eagles traded up, and the selection was announced. I won’t argue that the optics for that are poor, especially with the follow-up reporting seeming to indicate that Mike McCarthy’s connections to Dallas on the current Steelers staff might have given the Cowboys a window of opportunity to exploit.
That said, I don’t find this all that embarrassing. I find any implication that the Steelers panicked when picking Iheanachor to be detached from reality. Comments that he was a second or third-round talent seemingly come from fans whose first exposure to the draft class was on Thursday night. While Iheanachor was considered No. 28 on consensus boards, Ryland Bickley and I have talked about “the tackle tax” plenty and foresaw a run happening in front of the Steelers’ pick at 21. If you’ve been reading our work, this shouldn’t have been that surprising to you.
I also think it’s useful to remind the fanbase that this phone call snafu is far more common than they might think. The Steelers even once did this to the Cowboys!
There is also the seemingly eternal debate about whether offensive tackle or wide receiver is a better value. While I think the truth is more nuanced and depends on specific draft classes and prospects, most years I lean more towards tackle. For me, it comes down to the simple fact that it’s harder to find a tackle outside of Round 1 than it is to find a receiver. Of the 64 projected starting tackles in the NFL next year, 37 (58%) were first-round picks. Of the remaining 27 projected starters, 37% (10) of those were second-round picks. Meanwhile, if we look at the top-three projected receivers on each NFL team, just 32% are first-round picks. This year, seven tackles were selected on Day 1, and there were zero tackles drafted in the second round. And while five receivers heard their name in the first round this year, there were 12 taken between the second and third rounds. The opportunity cost to acquire a potential starting tackle is unquestionably higher.
Yes, the Steelers were prepared to select Lemon, but I do think it’s fair to wonder if spending a first on a player who would likely be relegated to a WR3 role — especialy if the youth-adverse Aaron Rodgers returns — would have been the wisest use of resources with the glaring hole at tackle and DK Metcalf ($32.5 million) and Michael Pittman Jr. ($26 million) both set to have cap hits north of $20 million starting in 2027. Now knowing that the Steelers were able to welcome Germie Bernard into the fold, I also think they come away with a receiver whose blocking ability will allow them to run a more diverse menu of plays from 11 personnel than they would have with Lemon.
I also can’t wrap my head around the notion that the Steelers shouldn’t draft a first-round tackle because of Broderick Jones. The common arguments I hear are that spending a third pick in four years on offensive tackle is a “luxury” and that the team missed on Jones, so they shouldn’t risk it again. Neither holds water for me. Opinions on Jones may very — though I think most of you agree with me that we can count Jones as a miss — but regardless, his health following his neck injury is a real question mark. If he were to miss time, is it sound process to trust Dylan Cook — a 28-year-old developmental project with just five starts and 348 NFL snaps to his name — or a mid-round rookie to shoulder that burden? I suspect fans would complain that the Steelers neglected the depth chart should Cook struggle or be injured himself.
It also makes little sense to argue the Steelers shouldn’t draft a first-round tackle again because of missing on Jones. For starters, how would that logic sound if we were instead talking about the quarterback position and Kenny Pickett? This front office missed on Pickett within the last four years. If a passer is available to them in the first round next year, should they pass up on them even if neither Drew Allar nor Will Howard earns their long-term confidence in 2026? Of course not. Ignoring a problem doesn’t fix it. Picks miss, but that shouldn’t lock the team into avoiding potential improvements when the opportunity is available.
There will be time to discuss the quality and ceiling of Iheanchor — I plan to do a film series on each of Pittsburgh’s draft selections — but the rancor the selection received should be considered an overreaction. In that future article, I’ll make the case for why I don’t consider Iheanachor nearly as “raw” as the pundits would lead you to believe. But for now, I’ve gone on long enough.
OK, Joey. Tell me all the ways I’m wrong about this.
CON: First of all, thank you for including me in this article. I think Ryan and I have completely opposite opinions on the entirety of the Steelers draft class, which is what is going to make our next episode of “Trust The Board” so much fun (stay tuned for that). While I think most people agree that it is unfair for Max Iheanachor to be included in a drama that the Steelers brought upon themselves on night one of the draft, that is ultimately what fans will always associate and judge this pick by.
The optics of the whole thing are about as nightmarish as you can imagine. I was admittedly not aware of how common an occurrence it was to have a prospect on the phone before you were officially on the clock. This does not excuse the fact that this happened during a draft in your city in which you had 12 picks at your disposal. Makai Lemon falling as far as he did was a blessing for the Steelers, someone they had clearly been interested in throughout the entire process.
Lemon was the only receiver that went in the first round that they invited in for a top 30 visit. In his last press conference before the NFL Draft, Steelers general manager Omar Khan was asked specifically about the time he sprinted with Makai Lemon during the pre-draft process. Instead of shrugging off the question, he called the visit “excellent time spent.” Now, personally, I did not think in a million years that Lemon would be on the board at 21 for Pittsburgh, but the Steelers were completely unaware of who was drafting in front of them.
The Dallas Cowboys and Mike McCarthy have a long history, and I think it’s safe to say that things did not end well for McCarthy in Dallas. So much so that Jerry Jones would rather deal the pick to his division rivals, the Philadelphia Eagles, than see McCarthy have the chance to coach what was obviously his favorite receiver in the draft. I think you are naive to think that Dallas was not considering the fact that they were blocking the Steelers from getting Lemon more than anything.
Khan and McCarthy acted scared, and instead of trading up, they got caught sleeping in front of the entire city of Pittsburgh. It would have taken, probably, a fifth-round pick, at the absolute most, to move up one spot. I do think the Cowboys would have much rather dealt the pick to the Steelers if both teams offered packages, but make no mistake, Jerry Jones did get a kick out of keeping Lemon away from McCarthy.
I think our managing editor, Jarrett Bailey, said it perfectly in his reaction piece to the Steelers missing out on Lemon.
“It’s almost poetic that it was the Eagles who jumped the Steelers, considering Pittsburgh so obviously wants to be Philadelphia from a team standpoint. Assistant general manager Andy Weidl came from the Eagles, and the way the Steelers have gone about roster building in the trenches is similar to what Philadelphia has done over the last 5-10 years. Unfortunately, the Steelers lack the killer instinct that Roseman and the Eagles have.”
I got the reasoning for picking Iheanachor. Ryan and I have talked with each other about this draft class enough that I was also a fan of him as a prospect. However, the optics of the situation speak to the way the Steelers have been run over the past decade. They cosplay as a franchise that has had a bevy of success over the last decade or so, when we all know they have not. The Steelers loaded up on draft picks this year to presumably make a trade-up for a quarterback. Once it became clear that this quarterback class was much weaker than originally anticipated, I think most assumed this gave the Steelers more flexibility to move up for a quality player at a position of need and still address other major needs. Instead, they waited and tried to outsmart the rest of the league, when they are the ones who have continuously been outsmarted for years now. For a team that seems to be dead set on winning a playoff game, they certainly held onto that extra late-round pick instead of going to get a dynamic outside playmaker that they have needed for years now.
I think it’s fair to feel this way when one of the most plugged-in Steelers insiders, Gerry Dulac, agrees the pick fell flat.
I hope and pray that this is finally the time they get the offensive line right. Just two years ago, the offensive line was completely overhauled with Troy Fautanu, Zach Frazier, and Mason McCormick all being drafted within the first four rounds of the 2024 NFL Draft. The drafting of Iheanachor all but signals the end of the Broderick Jones experiment in Pittsburgh. Which is honestly really sad, as Jones suffered a tough freak injury at a time when I was starting to become really impressed with his play. Whether this decision was more injury or performance-related, the Steelers have made it clear that they believe a change was needed.
I really do think Iheanachor was a solid pick at a position that the Steelers viewed as a need. I would have preferred this option rather than spending a pick on a different receiver like Omar Cooper Jr. or KC Concepcion, just one pick after Lemon went off the board. However, this doesn’t change the fact that all of this could have been easily avoided, and fair or not, this is how this pick will be remembered. The Steelers have nobody to blame for this but themselves.
It is completely fair to like Iheanachor as a player, but also question the process that the Steelers took and say that they failed to get the guy that they clearly wanted all along.
RP: Joey is right that we have some differing opinions about the Steelers draft, though I’ll admit I have mixed feelings about the totality of the class too. It’s why I thought discussing such a polarizing class would be a fun exercise for our community.
This article is already too long, so I’ll wrap things up here, but I did want to highlight Joey’s comments about the Steelers not trading up more aggressively with their 12 picks. That will be a key part of the discussion in the next article in this series, where we’ll discuss the Germie Bernard pick and how it plays off the results of the first round.
What did you think about how the Steelers’ first pick went down? Were you upset or disappointed about what happened? Would you rather have had Makai Lemon? Or are you happier with Max Iheanachor? Let us know in the comments!
