PITTSBURGH -- The most influential person of the Pittsburgh Steelers' 2025 NFL draft wasn't sitting in the team war room. He wasn't even on the other end of any of the seven phone calls made by Mike Tomlin to his draftees over the three-day event.
Instead, he was elsewhere, perhaps at his Malibu home, sitting on his deck watching dolphins frolic in the Pacific. Or maybe in a dark cave pondering his future, or even at a Costa Rican retreat searching for clarity in holistic healing rituals.
Aaron Rodgers isn't a member of the Steelers, but the team assembled its 2025 draft class as if he soon would be.
"We're still kind of getting the same signals that we've been getting recently," team owner and president Art Rooney II told Steelers Nation Radio, the team's flagship program, on Friday night. "He does want to come here, so I do think we may get word soon."
Despite the Steelers' repeated insistence that Rodgers would not influence their draft strategy, their actions in the 2025 draft speak louder than the words uttered by team brass. Passing on a quarterback four times before finally selecting 24-year-old developmental prospect Will Howard out of Ohio State in the sixth round suggests Rodgers was very much present in their decision-making process.
"We did not factor in whether Aaron is coming or not into that," Rooney said of the team's draft to that point. "If we do draft a quarterback -- and we still might -- it's probably not going to be somebody who is going to start for us this year. It's going to be somebody who is developing and may play down the road.
"As far as I'm concerned, it's not somebody who is going to have a big impact [this year] if we draft a quarterback."
At the time of Rooney's interview, the team was still 20 hours away from selecting Howard, but the owner's words still appeared true with the pick. Though Howard has a national championship pedigree and four years of FBS football on his résumé, he doesn't project as a day one starter. Despite completing an impressive 73% of his pass attempts at Ohio State, Howard still needs work to correct the inconsistent throwing mechanics on display in his combine performance and improve his processing speed to adapt to NFL defenses. The Steelers had plenty of opportunities to draft higher-rated prospects, yet each time, they elected to address areas they viewed as more pressing.
That suggests that either the Steelers are incredibly confident Rodgers will sign in Pittsburgh or they strongly believe -- far more than those outside the organization -- that Mason Rudolph is a capable Week 1 starter. Or perhaps the Steelers are working on a third option: acquiring a quarterback via trade. Atlanta's Kirk Cousins is the priciest of those options, but the team could also wait to see which signal-callers shake loose from crowded rooms in Cleveland and New York.
"That's certainly a possibility," Tomlin told NFL Network's Rich Eisen on Saturday afternoon of Rodgers joining the team. "I'm not going to forecast the ifs and whens regarding not only him but any other potential free agent. We've had really productive talks with him, and I've enjoyed having productive talks with him and getting to know him."
In the first round, of course, the Steelers selected Oregon defensive tackle Derrick Harmon while every quarterback remained on the board other than No. 1 pick Cam Ward.
"We were on the clock," general manager Omar Khan said, asked whether he was tempted by a quarterback with the pick. "We got the player that we wanted."
By the time the Steelers were back on the clock with the No. 83 selection Friday night, only three quarterbacks were unavailable: Ward, Jaxson Dart and Tyler Shough.
Once again, the team spurned the position and filled another hole, this time with Iowa running back Kaleb Johnson. Nine picks later, the Seattle Seahawks took Alabama quarterback Jalen Milroe, whom the Steelers met and dined with at his pro day.
Still without a quarterback as the draft rolled into Day 3, the Steelers bypassed signal-callers with their next two picks in the fourth and fifth rounds despite Colorado's Shedeur Sanders, whom the team hosted on a top-30 visit, still being available. The Steelers even used their fourth-round pick on Ohio State edge rusher Jack Sawyer, adding a player to an already flush position rather than Sanders, whom Tomlin had praised for his competitive spirit and toughness less than a week earlier.
Finally, the team went with Howard, ranked seventh among quarterbacks in Mel Kiper's predraft Big Board, in the sixth round. Howard, predicted as high as the third round in some mock drafts, was a good value pickup in the sixth round -- especially as a developmental prospect who could have the opportunity to learn behind Rodgers.
"It's not a matter of what happens out on the field or if I play right away, it's about getting better and it's about learning and whoever is in the room with me, whoever is there competing with us," Howard said. "I just cannot wait to delve into this situation and to really give my all to this team because that's how I do things, man. I don't do things half in. I go all-in, and I have every expectation that this next step with the Pittsburgh Steelers is going to be amazing for me."
But if the Steelers don't round out their quarterback room with Rodgers, the next steps might not be so amazing for the team.