A couple of days ago during the Pittsburgh Steelers’ pre-draft press conference, General Manager Kevin Colbert talked about the team’s desire to keep their rookie first-round picks off the field for as long as they could. “The people we draft, the longer we can keep them off the field the better for them historically”, he said, specifically, though he was generally talking about first-rounders.
This seemed to rankle some feathers, with a few even saying that if you can’t draft a first-rounder who plays right away then you did something wrong. Within the present context, that might be true.