The Pittsburgh Steelers haven’t had a long-term young quarterback to build their program around since 2023, when Pitt product Kenny Pickett played out his final season for the black and yellow before being traded to the Philadelphia Eagles.
With Arthur Smith in place as offensive coordinator and Mike Tomlin’s head coaching tenure going strong, the Steelers tried to win with Russell Wilson, with Justin Fields, and most recently with Aaron Rodgers, but all that strategy produced was keeping the team good enough to miss out on a premium pick but nowhere near good enough for another Super Bowl run.
Discussing how the Steelers will use their selections in the 2026 NFL Draft, ESPN’s Marc Spears boldly declared that Pittsburgh needs to bring Ty Simpson to town, as at this rate, they can’t afford to remain on the just-good-enough QB carousel any longer.
“They wanted Mike Tomlin gone, they wanted the GM gone, they wanted to figure out how to quarterback, they wanted Aaron Rodgers gone. A lot of the sentiment was about this particular position, and we are back in this revolving cycle,” Spears said.
“Here’s the problem: the Pittsburgh Steelers are a proud organization that has experienced a tremendous amount of success, that it’s hard for them to think that we’ll have a bad season. So they stay in the offseason, and they try to find a quarterback that can makeshift something and hopefully they get to the playoffs and try to have some success and reinvigorate something old.”
Pretty harrowing stuff, right? But Spears wasn’t done. No, regardless of how the board shakes out for the Steelers later this month, they simply can’t afford not to take shot after shot on young quarterbacks until they find their guy moving forward.
“We find ourselves again with the Pittsburgh Steelers picking 20th with no quarterback for the future, a team now to your point babyface that defense is getting old which they wanted to hang their hats on by having Aaron Rodgers at 40-plus years old. There’s a lot of glaring issues in Pittsburgh but the one glaring issue that you cannot win without in this league is high level quarterback play,” Spears noted.
“I’m not talking about competent high quarterback play, I’m not talking about average quarterback play, you cannot win how the Steelers want to win without a high level of quarterback play and they need to figure out if that’s not going to be a guy that’s proven to play at a high level, they got to take swings at quarterbacks out of college and hope one of them can turn into their Dak Prescott.”
On paper, there’s a reason why Simpson has been such a popular pick for teams outside of the top-15 in desperate need of a quarterback of the future. While he didn’t start as many games as some would like, his efforts against Wisconsin and Vanderbilt were some of the very best games any quarterback played in 2025, regardless of their draft stock. If Simpson is on the board at pick No. 20, the Steelers will have a hard time passing on his service, especially since he could land in Cleveland a few picks later.
“There’s a lot of glaring issues in Pittsburgh, but the one glaring issue that you cannot win without in this league, is high-level quarterback play.”@mspears96 thinks the Steelers should draft Ty Simpson regardless if Aaron Rodgers is there pic.twitter.com/AOYe18XK3y
— NFL on ESPN (@ESPNNFL) April 7, 2026
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