I won’t bury the lede here. What the Pittsburgh Steelers look for in a receiver is simple.
Speed and explosion.
If you don’t have one of those, very rarely does Mike Tomlin ring you up on draft day.
Now, there are obviously a hundred factors that we could explore in breaking something down like this. But there is a pretty basic and clear correlation, If you don’t run fast or show explosion in your vertical and/or broad jump, you’re playing elsewhere.
Let’s look through the ten receivers drafted under Tomlin and see how the numbers stack up.