Steelers First Round Draft Picks

Today, January 29, 2020, marks the fifty-first anniversary of the day that the Steelers selected Joe Greene of North Texas State with their first round selection (#4 overall) in the 1969 NFL Draft.  Remember the newspaper headline of the next day: "JOE WHO?" Anyway, I would argue that this is the moment in time that everything, and I mean EVERYTHING,  changed for the Pittsburgh Steelers.

Because of the trade earlier this season that the Steelers made with Miami for Minkah Fitzpatrick, 2020 will mark the first year since 1967 that the Steelers will not have a selection in the first round of the draft,  

These two facts prompted me to think of first round picks in the past, and that prompted me to do a little research (thank  you, Wikipedia!), and that prompted me to do a Grandstander Spreadsheet.

YEAR	NOLL	Pos	YEAR	COWHER	Pos	YEAR	TOMLIN	Pos
1969	Joe Greene	DT	1992	Leon Searcy	DT	2007	Lawrence Timmons	LB
70	Terry Bradshaw	QB	93	Deon Figures	DB	2008	Rashard Mendenhall	RB
71	Frank Lewis	WR	94	Charles Johnson	WR	2009	Evander Hood	DT
72	Franco Harris	RB	95	Mark Bruener	TE	2010	Maurkice Pouncey	C
73	JT Thomas	DB	96	Jamain Stephens	OT	11	Cameron Heywood	DE
74	Lynn Swann	WR	97	Chad Scott	DB	12	David DeCastro	G
75	Dave Brown	DB	98	Alan Faneca	G	13	Jarvis Jones	LB
76	Bennie Cunningham	TE	99	Troy Edwards	WR	14	Ryan Shazier	LB
77	Robin Cole	LB	2000	Plaxico Burress	WR	15	Bud Dupree	LB
78	Ron Johnson	DB	2001	Casey Hampton	DT	16	Artie Burns	DB
79	Greg Hawthorne	RB	2002	Kendall Simmons	G	17	TJ Watt	LB
80	Mark Malone	QB	2003	Troy Polamalu	DB	18	Terrelle Edmunds	DB
81	Keith Gary	DE	2004	Ben Roethlisberger	QB	19	Devin Bush	LB
82	Walter Abercrombie	RB	2005	Heath Miller	TE
83	Gabe Rivera	DE	2006	Santonio Holmes	WR
84	Louis Lipps	WR
85	Darryl Sims	DE
86	John Reinstra	G
87	Rod Woodson	DB
88	Aaron Jones	DE
89	Tim Worley          Tom Ricketts	RB OT
90	Eric Green	TE
91	Huey Richardson	DE

What you see are 52 players selected over the past fifty-one seasons (two first rounders in 1989), divided among the three coaches, Chuck Noll, Bill Cowher, and Mike Tomlin.  It should also be noted that these drafts were also overseen by three different Personnel Guys/GM's, Art Rooney Jr. (Noll Era), Tom Donahue (Noll and Cowher), and Kevin Colbert (Cowher and Tomlin).  

Okay, besides evoking a lot of memories, most of them good, what do you do with this info?  I decided to look at the picks of each Coach and see how many Hits and how many Misses they had.  Some players by my totally subjective reckoning fell in some nebulous middle ground and were "just okay."

So here you go:

CHUCK NOLL

Hits (12, or 50%) - Greene, Bradshaw, Lewis, Harris, Thomas, Swann, Brown*, Cunningham, Cole, Lipps, Woodson, Green.

Misses (7, or 29%) - Hawthorne, Sims, Reinstra, Jones, Worley, Ricketts, Richardson

Just OK (4, or 17%) - Johnson, Malone, Gary, Abercrombie

We'll Never Know (1, or  1%) - Rivera

*Brown only played one year for the Steelers, and was selected, to the Steelers dismay, in the expansion draft by Seattle, where he enjoyed a long and productive career, so he has to be considered a "hit" even though it was for another team.

Eleven of these players played in Super Bowls for the Steelers. Five are in the Hall of Fame.

BILL COWHER

Hits (8, or 53%) - Bruener, Faneca, Burress, Hampton, Polamalu, Roethlisberger, Miller, Holmes

Misses (4, or 27%) - Searcy, Figures, Stephens, Simmons

Just OK (3, or 20%) - Johnson, Scott, Edwards

Seven of these players played in Super Bowls for the Steelers. Three of them are probable Hall of Famers.

MIKE TOMLIN

Hits (7, or 54%) - Timmons, Pouncey, Heywood, DeCastro, Shazier, Watt, Bush

Misses (3, or 23%) - Hood, Jones, Burns

Just OK (3, or 23%) - Mendenhall, Dupree, Edmunds

Two of these players have played in Super Bowls for the Steelers (so far).

Right now I see two of these guys as possible Hall of Famers, Pouncey and DeCastro; and perhaps Watt if he continues to progress as he has over his first three years.

So what does all of this prove?  Probably not much, and the real lesson is that teams are not built by first round picks alone.  Steelers Super Bowl wins fell on the shoulders of many, many players who were selected in later rounds (Greenwood, Stallworth, Webster, Ham, Lambert, and Ward to name a few) and other Steelers successes on the shoulders of many, many other stars who came well after the first round, like Kordell Stewart, Neil O'Donnell, Antonio Brown and Juju Smith-Shuster, to name a few others.

I guess if there is something to be learned here it is that the lack of a first round pick in 2020 does not and should not spell gloom and doom for the Steelers next season.  There is at least a fifty percent chance that Fitzpatrick will be better than any college kid that they would have selected with that eighteenth overall pick in April.  If they come up with three or four good players with their later round picks,  guys who can start for them, things will be alright.

Oh, and just for fun, I did look at Steelers first round picks in the ten years prior to 1969, 1959-68.  The Steelers had traded away their #1 Pick in the odd numbered years in that period.  In the even numbered years, here were their selections:

1960 - Jack Spikes

1962 - Bob Ferguson

1964 - Paul Martha

1966 - Dick Leftridge

1968 - Mike Taylor

I have no memory of Spikes as a Steeler, but I think that he went on to some success in the early years of the AFL.  Martha had a good career as a Steeler, and Ferguson, Leftridge, and Taylor were colossal busts.  

One other interesting note.  In 1957, the Steelers did use their first round pick to select a future Hall of Famer, QB Len Dawson of Purdue.  In three seasons in Pittsburgh, Dawson appeared in 19 games, threw 17 passes, completed six, and had one TD pass and two interceptions.  Better days were ahead for him when the AFL came into existence.

Like I said at the beginning of this post, that pick of Joe Greene in 1969 changed everything for the Steelers.

GMBC Acts - Finally

New Pirates General Manager Ben Cherington made his first significant move, player personnel-wise (the signings of two sub-.200 hitting catchers and an outfielder DFA'd by the Rays don't count), as Bucco GM when he traded outfielder Starling Marte, 31 and scheduled to make $11.5 million in 2020, to the Arizona Diamondbacks for shortstop Liover Peguero and pitcher Brennan Malone, both players are highly touted prospects in the D'backs organization and are both 19 years of age.

Marte, the last remaining Pirate from the 2013-15 playoff teams, is coming off of his best season, and he should bolster the Arizona line up, but, at age 31, he could soon be hitting the wall and starting to see a decline in his skills.  Peguero and Malone, if they end up helping the Pirates at all, don't figure to be able to do so until at least the latter half of the 2022 season, at the earliest.

It is a trade that makes sense, kind of, for a team that knows it's going nowhere in the immediate present and needs to build for the future.  The Pirates, of course, aren't saying that.   The new regime is telling us that they do not need to go into a rebuilding mode, that they feel that they can compete now. Yes, the team that lost 97 games last year, they are ready to go to the post with THAT team, minus Marte, of course.

And that $10 million in salary that they jettisoned yesterday (the Pirates agreed to pay $1.5 million of Marte's '20 salary) will pretty much cover what Bob Nutting owes Clint Hurdle and Neal Huntington over the next two years, so that's good news for BN's bottom line.  No small consideration down there on Federal Street.

One of my gripes with Neal Huntington was that he always thought that he was the smartest guy in the baseball universe, and that we, the Pirates Fan Base, was stupid, so he continued to insult our intelligence with his wordy pronouncements.  I really and truly want to keep an open mind about the Williams-Cherington-Shelton team, but please, please don't tell me fabrications about the prospects of this team NOW, in 2020, if the real plan is to start from scratch and rebuild for a better future two, three or four years down the road.

As for Starling Marte, he was and is a talented player, although he never reached the Five Tool heights that were predicted for him, and his tendency to suffer mental lapses and appear lackadaisical way too often were maddening.  The case can be made that he was the Pirates best player this past season, and they are a poorer team today than they were yesterday now that he is gone.   Still, the Pirates finished in last place and lost 97 games with him last year, so they can easily do the same without him this year.

However, they don't play a game that counts until March 26, so who knows what rabbits Cherington may be able to pull out of his hat between now and then, but a wise gambler should probably take this opportunity to head on down to the Rivers or Meadows Sports books or one of his online gambling apps and bet heavily on the UNDER for Bucco wins in 2020.

To Absent Friends - Kobe Bryant

Kobe Bryant

1978 - 2020

NBA MVP 2008

Two time NBA Finals MVP

Five time NBA Champion
18 time NBA All-Star

Two time Olympic Gold Medalist

Academy Award Winner

The news of the death of Kobe Bryant, 41, his thirteen year old daughter, Gianna, and seven other people in a helicopter crash in Los Angeles this morning can only be described as stunning and incredibly sad.   Tragedy does not discriminate in favor of the famous, the physically gifted, and the wealthy.

On December 2, 2015, I made a post on this blog entitled "Last Call for Legends" (you can look it up) that addressed what appeared to be the imminent end to the careers of three of sports' greatest legends, Kobe Bryant, Peyton Manning, and Tiger Woods.  What I wrote about Bryant that day is still applicable today, so my final tribute to him will be those words from over four years ago......

Kobe Bryant has announced that he will be retiring at the end of this current NBA season.  Recent years have not been kind to Bryant.  Injuries have caused him to miss large parts of the past two seasons.  He returned in good health for this season, only to find that the skills that make him an NBA MVP, and NBA and an Olympic champion have deserted him.  He currently sports a shooting percentage in the neighborhood of thirty percent, and is causing many to compare him to Willie Mays as a New York Met.  Others are saying that he should retire NOW, immediately, and not drag out this final season as a shadow of his former, great self.  He has chosen to do otherwise, and I suppose that it can be argued that for all Bryant has done for the Lakers and the NBA, he has earned the right to go out on whatever terms he chooses.  So bring on the league-wide Farewell Tour.  It will be the last chance to see a guy who surely ranks among the Top Ten greatest players of all time.

My own personal memory of Bryant:  Setting the alarm clock for 2:00 AM on a Sunday morning in 2008 to watch the Gold Medal game of the Beijing Olympics live between the USA and Spain.  The Spanish team put up a good game against the favored Americans, but in the second half, it was Kobe Bryant who took control of the game and secured the Gold Medal for the USA.

RIP Kobe and Gianna Bryant and the seven others who died today in California.

Gianna and Kobe Bryant

"1917" and Other Critical Commentary

Yesterday, I took in the Academy Award nominated movie, "1917", directed and co-written (along with Krysty Wilson-Cairns) by Sam Mendes.   Normally, I am not attracted to war movies as a genre, but the critical buzz surrounding this one, its multiple Oscar nominations, and its wins at the Golden Globes and SAG Awards,  put this on my "To See" list.  Plus, and not to get too geeky about it, the manner in which it was filmed, to appear that it was done one continuous take (much like Hitchcock's "Rope") made me really want to see it.  I will say that this "one take" aspect of the movie really was amazing.

I did like the movie.  Unlike "Saving Private Ryan", to which it has been compared, "1917" doesn't deal too much with actual battle scenes and gruesome deaths, although there is some of that, but it does show a lot of the aftermaths of brutal warfare, as the protagonists encounter fields littered with dead bodies, both human and animal, and decimated landscapes and buildings.   Movies have forever been showing us the brutality and futility of warfare, it will always be thus, and "1917" does it as well as any movie that you will see.

With exception of Colin Firth and Benedict Cumberbatch, who were on screen for only a few minutes each, the actors were unknown to me, but recognition has to be given to British actors Dean-Charles Chapman and George McKay who played the British soldiers Blake and Schofield.  They were great.  Chapman, while  unknown to me, was one of the stars of "Game of Thrones", so he is no doubt familiar to a lot of you who may be reading this.

Also, play attention to the "Dedication" that Mendes gives to this movie when it ends and the screen goes to black.  That had a real effect on me and made me see the movie in a different light.

Would this have made my "Ten Favorites of 2019" had I seen it in the calendar year of 2019?  Probably would have, although, I'm not sure which movie on that list I'd have bumped off in favor of it.  I am sure that this movie will be taking home some Oscars next month.

The Grandstander gives this one Three Stars.

Catching up on a couple of items from earlier in the month.....

After watching Seasons 1 and 2 of Amazon's "The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel", the fear existed that Season 3 would in no way be able to live up to the high expectations that fans of the show had for it.  Fear not, as this newest season was every bit as good, funny, charming, and poignant as the previous two.  When it was over, we had the same sentiment as after the previous seasons: "What? We have to wait a whole year for NEXT season?  Bummer!"

Four Stars from The Grandstander.

"Jesus Christ Superstar", the production that introduced Andrew Lloyd Webber to the world is celebrating its 50th Anniversary in 2020.  When it was unleashed upon the world in 1970, I was, of course aware of it, but I had never seen a production of it, nor did I ever own the album - the famous "Brown Album".  I knew only three of its songs, the title song, Everything's Alright, and the wonderful I Don't Know How to Love Him.

The Fiftieth Anniversary tour production of the show came to Pittsburgh in the first week of January as part of the Broadway in Pittsburgh schedule.   The show was a wonderful production.  Great rock music from the on-stage band and interesting choreography that made the show a true spectacle (in a good way), but I really wish that I had made the effort to listen to the music of the show ahead of time.  Save for the three songs mentioned above, I had a hard time hearing and understanding the lyrics over the loud rock music of the band (wow, did I just sound REALLY OLD with that statement!).  As I have told everybody who asks about listening to the music of "Hamilton" before you see the show, that is precisely what I should have done before seeing JCS.  My loss, unfortunately.

Two and One-Half Stars from The Grandstander, which no doubt puts me in the minority.

NFL Quarterbacks in Transition 2020

The news that was leaked yesterday concerning the announcement that Giants quarterback Eli Manning will be formally announcing his retirement tomorrow, prompted me to sit and offer some comments that have been bubbling in my cranium (to use a Myron Cope-ism) for sometime now, and that is that the 2019 NFL season and post-season may be looked back upon at some future date as the year where an  "Old Guard" of outstanding and even Hall of Fame worthy cast of NFL quarterbacks gave way to a new wave of quarterbacks who will dominate the League for the next decade or so.

Let's begin with the three QB's who were drafted within the first eleven picks of the 2004 NFL Draft.

Eli Manning  Manning pretty much began showing signs of being washed up in the 2018 season.  The Giants drafted a QB in the first round last year, and Manning was benched early in this season.  His retirement comes as no surprise.  He was not the quarterback that his brother was, but he is a two time Super Bowl MVP, so his enshrinement in Canton is virtually assured.

Phillip Rivers  Rivers had a great season in 2018, and his Chargers made the playoffs, but his numbers were off this year, the team wasn't any good, and Rivers is an unrestricted free agent who undoubtedly will be playing with another team next year.  He might be able to help a good team who really needs a QB, but he is near the end of a good career.

Ben Roethlisberger  Big Ben left the second game of 2019 with an elbow injury that required surgery, and he was lost for the season.  He plans on coming back in 2020 for a 17th season.  In 2018, he was easily the best of his draft class counterparts, but in 2020, he will be 38 years old, will be coming off of major elbow surgery, and he will not have played in an actual game since September, 2019.  the Steelers and their fans can hope that he will be as good as ever, but there are no guarantees.

Before I continue with this little essay, let me offer this Fun Fact.  In addition Eli, Phillip, and Ben, fourteen (14!!) other quarterbacks were drafted by NFL teams in 2004.  The most notable name among them was Matt Schaub, and two other recognizable names were J.P. Losman and and Luke McKown.  After that, you get names like Jeff Smoker, Casey Bramlet, and Bradlee Van Pelt.  None of them are going to Canton unless they buy an admission ticket.

Let's look at a few other guys:

Tom Brady  He is undoubtedly the greatest quarterback of all time, but this year he began to show some slippage.  Part of that can be attributed to the fact that his surrounding cast wasn't as good as it had been in the past.  He did lead the Patriots to a division title, but in the Playoff game against the Titans, he looked just like a 42 year old guy who just may have reached the end of the line.  His last pass in that game was an interception thrown from his own end zone that was returned for a touchdown.  He is now a free agent, and he says he wants to keep playing.  Can he help a good team that just needs an experienced quarterback as a final piece of their puzzle?  Probably he could, but it seems almost unthinkable that we would see Tom Brady in another uniform next year.  The picture of Willie Mays as a New York Met comes to mind.  Not that I love or even like the Patriots or Brady, but I hope that this doesn't happen.

Drew Brees  Like Brady, Brees had a good year, but he also looked like a 40 year old guy in the Saints playoff loss to the Vikings.  He says that he is "undecided" about coming back next year.

Andrew Luck  After missing all of 2017, Luck came back in '18 with a terrific season, but after yet another injury, he retired right before the start of the 2019 season at the age of 29.

Cam Newton  At the age of 30, one time league MVP was benched this year by the Panthers and will be playing elsewhere in 2020.

Aaron Rodgers  Maybe not fair to lump Rodgers into this category, because he had a very good season and led the Packers to a playoff win against Seattle, but he had a very bad first half against the 49'ers in the NFC title game, and his facial expressions and body language showed every bit of his 36 years.

On the other end of the spectrum were whole raft of exciting and young quarterbacks who appear to be ready to take over the NFL.  Leading the way are Patrick Mahomes, last season's MVP and probably the best and most exciting player in the NFL right now, Lamar Jackson, the presumptive MVP this season and deservedly so, and Deshaun Watson.  Maybe even throw in Baker Mayfield  into this mix if he can survive the mess that is the Cleveland Browns.  Then there a some guys like Russell Wilson, Dak Prescott, Matt Ryan, Jarrod Goff, and Carson Wentz, who have been around for awhile and could be factors for years to come in the NFL.

And finally, looming out there is LSU's Joe Burrow whom the Bengals, presumably, will take with the overall Number One selection in this year's Draft.

Yep, the guard is changing at the most important position in the NFL, and 2019 maybe seen as the year that this change took place.

Before I leave, let me speak as a partisan Pittsburgh Steelers fan for a moment.  If you've been paying attention, you know that the Steelers will be going into 2020 with a sure fire Hall of Famer at QB, but one who is 38 years old, and they will be in a division that will be requiring them to play two games a year for the next decade or so against teams led by Lamar Jackson, Joe Burrow, and Baker Mayfield.   This is not a hopeful sign.  Maybe Mason Rudolph will one day be the guy who will be the equal to these three Central Division rivals, but 2019 showed that he is still very much a work in progress.  There is also the very real possibility that the well demonstrated ineptness of the Bengals and the Browns could nullify the skills of Burrow and Mayfield.  In any event, the Steelers, who are aging in other areas as well as at quarterback, appear to have their work cut out for them in the next few seasons.