NFL

How Aaron Rodgers influenced the Steelers' draft strategy

Brooke PryorApr 28, 2025, 06:00 AM ET
Close

PITTSBURGH — The most influential person of the Pittsburgh Steelers’ 2025 NFL draft wasn’t sitting in the team war room. He wasn’t even on the other end of any of the seven phone calls made by Mike Tomlin to his draftees over the three-day event.

Instead, he was elsewhere, perhaps at his Malibu home, sitting on his deck watching dolphins frolic in the Pacific. Or maybe in a dark cave pondering his future, or even at a Costa Rican retreat searching for clarity in holistic healing rituals.

Aaron Rodgers isn’t a member of the Steelers, but the team assembled its 2025 draft class as if he soon would be.

“We’re still kind of getting the same signals that we’ve been getting recently,” team owner and president Art Rooney II told Steelers Nation Radio, the team’s flagship program, on Friday night. “He does want to come here, so I do think we may get word soon.”

Editor’s Picks

1 Related

Despite the Steelers’ repeated insistence that Rodgers would not influence their draft strategy, their actions in the 2025 draft speak louder than the words uttered by team brass. Passing on a quarterback four times before finally selecting 24-year-old developmental prospect Will Howard out of Ohio State in the sixth round suggests Rodgers was very much present in their decision-making process.

“We did not factor in whether Aaron is coming or not into that,” Rooney said of the team’s draft to that point. “If we do draft a quarterback — and we still might — it’s probably not going to be somebody who is going to start for us this year. It’s going to be somebody who is developing and may play down the road.

“As far as I’m concerned, it’s not somebody who is going to have a big impact [this year] if we draft a quarterback.”

At the time of Rooney’s interview, the team was still 20 hours away from selecting Howard, but the owner’s words still appeared true with the pick. Though Howard has a national championship pedigree and four years of FBS football on his résumé, he doesn’t project as a day one starter. Despite completing an impressive 73% of his pass attempts at Ohio State, Howard still needs work to correct the inconsistent throwing mechanics on display in his combine performance and improve his processing speed to adapt to NFL defenses. The Steelers had plenty of opportunities to draft higher-rated prospects, yet each time, they elected to address areas they viewed as more pressing.