The Steelers decision to ship Kendrick Green off to the Houston Texans for a 6th round pick in the 2025 NFL Draft is a pure admission of failure on the part of the front office.
- Third round picks are supposed to grow into starters.
Steelers guard/center takes reps at fullback. Photo Credit: Chaz Palla, Tribune-Review
Kendrick Green’s trajectory with the Steelers went in the opposite direction. He started immediately, got benched late in his first year, stood in street clothes his second year, and was dealt at fire sale prices in his third year.
- NFL teams don’t give up on third round picks so easily. The Steelers offer no exception.
The Steelers gave the boot to just one year Bruce Davis after drafting him third in the 2008 NFL Draft. Two Septembers, they also cut rookie Kraig Urbik, but that move was a miscalculation on their part, forced by the need to carry Charlie Batch on the 2010 roster.
As the stories of Curtis Brown, Sean Spence and Senquez Golson reveal, the Steelers normally bend over backwards to give a third round second, third and fourth chances to make the team.
And in a sense, the Steelers did that with Green. They moved him to guard in 2022, sort of giving him a Redshirt year as he was inactive for all 17 games. In 2023 they gave him work at both center and guard and even repped him at fullback.
Mike Tomlin singled him out after the Bills game, making no bones about the fact that his errant snaps to Mason Rudolph were unacceptable. Green saw action at both center and guard in the win over the Falcons, and in this observer’s opinion he did pretty well.
- Pat Meyer, Matt Canada and Mike Tomlin reached a different conclusion.
Thus ends the Kendrick Green experiment, after over a little over two years and 15 games. For a franchise that boasts a lineage at center that begins in the ‘60s with Ray Mansfield, dominates the 70’s with Mike Webster, continues into throughout the 1990’s with Dermontti Dawson and extends into the 21st century with Jeff Hartings and Maurkice Pouncey, Kendrick Green represents a tremendous disappointment.
But if Kendrick Green’s footnote in the Definitive History of the Pittsburgh Steelers will be short, his story leaves a lasting lesson:
- Drafting for need is dangerous. But sometimes its unavoidable.
Maurkice Pouncey’s retirement hit the Steelers at the worst possible time. Neither the coaches nor the front office were expecting it, particularly since Ben Roethlisberger returned for one more go.
Not only did the Steelers need to find a center, COVID-19 had plunged Pittsburgh into salary cap hell, cutting off free agency as a means to signing a new center. That left the draft. The Steelers tried to stick to their board picking Najee Harris and Pat Freiermuth in the 1st and 2nd rounds (cue the arguments that the Steelers should have taken Creed Humphrey before Najee Harris) but their hand was essentially forced by the third round, when they took Green.
You can argue that they were in the same position in the 4th round, and were essentially forced to pick Dan Moore. More, like Green struggled on, but he starts his third year by keeping 2023’s first round pick Broderick Jones on the bench.
So sometimes you can get away with drafting for need. But as The Wire’s Omar Little reminded us, “You come at the king, you best not miss.” Yep, the Steelers missed on Kendrick Green.
