There will be times this year that the Pittsburgh Steelers have eight former first-round picks on the field at the same time. Most of the time, they figure to have seven, when the defense is on the field. Some of them were their own draft picks. A handful of them, they’ve managed to acquire through other means.
Their pedigree represents the core of the Steelers’ defense, a unit driven largely by the sheer talent of the players on the field, which has been a process building for some period of time. Pittsburgh as used its first-round pick on a defensive player every year since 2013, beginning with the failed Jarvis Jones.