The nine members of the Steelers ’2021 draft class came from the Power 5 conference programs.
One of the benefits of this is that players get into the NFL feeling with powerful football. The daily mechanisms and frameworks that exist at this scale. The pressures and expectations associated with being a small piece of a multimillion-dollar engine.
The focus and the hype. Oh, and the noise of the crowd.
Many stadiums throughout the NCAA are larger than NFL buildings in terms of the actual game day crowd.
For example, the capacity of Heinz Field is currently 68,400. Buffalo Highmark Stadium is 71,208. The first two drafts, Najee Harris and Pat Freiermuth, are from Alabama and Penn State, respectively. Both university stadiums (Bryant-Denny Stadium and Beaver Stadium) have a capacity of over 100,000 people.
Both players have also played in road stadiums that have at least as many. So they know what it’s like to play in front of a vocal, noisy crowd. So do Kendrick Green, Buddy Johnson, Dan Moore Jr., Isaiahh Loudermilk, Tre Norwood and Pressley Harvin III.
But, as Steelers coach Mike Tomlin pointed out at this week’s press conference, measuring people’s noise through the large volume of humans in the seats is different from measuring a level of hostility.
As Tomlin suggests, a crowd of 75,000-80,000 people at a professional stage can create a completely different type of anxiety. Especially for beginners.
“Go to university settings, the root of the local team for your team. Go into a professional environment, root out against the visitor, ”Tomlin said Tuesday.
And that was a point Tomlin said he tried to drive home with as many of his freshmen as he could before opening in Buffalo last week.
“I just wanted them to understand,” Tomlin said. “A guy like (Freiermuth) has played in front of 100,000 every weekend. He thinks he’s ready for it, and he’s not. ”
If the Steelers rookies had trouble adjusting, it wasn’t obvious. Of the players listed above, only Loudermilk was inactive. And while none of those players stood out, none of them had such a serious rookie error that the Steelers couldn’t get over it. So maybe Tomlin’s advice may have resonated.
“There is a different intensity of university football there. Sixty-five (thousand) to 70 (thousand) can be different from any college setting, and I didn’t want to surprise them, ”Tomlin said.
And with the Bills mob in their throats after the appearance of the AFC title game last year, the Super Bowl publicity this year and a pandemic that kept them out of the stadium doors a while ago season, which can be so emaciated from an environment that this first year players see in 2021.
However, the “rooted against you” element may not be fully realized until the Steelers travel to Cleveland and Baltimore.
Visits to face the Browns for Halloween and the Ravens during the final week of the season have the potential to incline even more than those young players attended the No. 1 road game.
Now let’s see what kind of home support they get at Heinz Field at 1pm on Sunday for the first home game of the year against the Las Vegas Raiders.
Marcus Mosher joins Thursday’s podcast. Cover Vegas for Raiderswire.com. We see how the Raiders pulled off that wild win of overtime Monday night over the Ravens, the state of a depth chart exploding in the trenches and how close Darren Waller incites the drink on offense.
Listen: Benz and Mosher are scheduled for the Raiders-Steelers game on Sunday.
Tim Benz is a writer for Tribune-Review. You can contact Tim at [email protected] or via Twitter. All tweets can be posted. All emails are subject to publication unless otherwise specified.