The COVID-19 pandemic has created an increasingly awkward situation for NFL teams. An aspect of the team’s business you might not think about is in terms of scouting for the NFL draft. With college football conferences divided on whether or not to play this year, the Pittsburgh Steelers will be faced with a group of prospects, some of which won’t have a 2020 body of work to go off of.
This is a problem for Steelers general manager Kevin Colbert. He said given the option, he would draft a player who plays in 2020, as opposed to one that sits out. This is even the case for a player who plays in a conference that sits but the player opts out.
“The one thing, the conferences that chose not to play, and the players that opted out, we understand all that. Obviously, they are doing it for safety and health, first and foremost, and we respect that. However, the players that get the opportunity to play and choose to play, we feel more comfortable in their evaluations,” Colbert said.
“Because I just don’t know, sitting out a year, what those players are going to look like having missed the season,” Colbert said. “There’s just not a real natural source of information saying, ‘Well, when this player sits out, he’ll be this’ because we just don’t know. We respect the fact that they aren’t playing, but we also have to make the best decisions and I think the best decisions we’ll be able to make are the ones where we can see them play in 2020.”
Colbert’s point on this is 100 percent valid. It doesn’t matter how highly rated a player is going into the season, if they don’t play, it would be easy to move them down the board for a player of similar grade who they have 2020 game film to evaluate.
