TE Jesse James: 2015 Draft Grade Retrospective

It’s said a draft class can’t be fully graded until at least three years after the picks are made. That’s why after submitting grades for every Pittsburgh Steelers pick made in 2021, I began going back through and grading previous Steeler draft classes beginning with 2018. Today continuess the fourth class in that exercise, with the Steelers’ fifth-round pick in the 2015 NFL Draft: Jesse James, a tight end out of Penn State.

This exercise follows the six viewpoints (listed below) for examining and re-grading a pick. Each of the first five viewpoints gets examined and assigned a letter grade, before taking that analysis and combining it into a final letter grade. Those five viewpoints…