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The nine members of the 2021 Steelers’ provisional class were from the Power 5 conference programs.
One of the benefits of this is that players come to the NFL with a big football idea. The everyday mechanisms and framework that exist at this scale. The pressures and expectations associated with being a small piece of a multi-billion dollar engine.
The spotlight and the hype. Oh, and the noise of the crowd.
Many NCAA stadiums are larger than NFL buildings in terms of actual game day crowds.
For example, Heinz Field’s capacity is currently 68,400. Highmark Stadium in Buffalo is 71,208. The top two draft picks, Najee Harris and Pat Freiermuth, are from Alabama and Penn State respectively. Both of their university stadiums (Bryant-Denny Stadium and Beaver Stadium) have a capacity of over 100,000 people.
These two players have also played in road stadiums that can accommodate at least that many people. So they know what it’s like to perform in front of a loud, noisy crowd. Kendrick Green, Buddy Johnson, Dan Moore Jr., Isaiahh Loudermilk, Tre Norwood and Pressley Harvin III too.
But as Steelers coach Mike Tomlin pointed out at his press conference this week, measuring crowd noise through the volume of human beings in the seats is different from measuring a level of hostility.
As Tomlin suggests, a crowd of 75,000 to 80,000 people in a professional stadium can create a whole different kind of anxiety. Especially for beginners.
“You go to college environments, the roots of the home team for their team. You go into a professional environment, they oppose the visitor, ”Tomlin said Tuesday.
And that’s a point Tomlin said he tried to bring home as many of his freshmen as he could before the opener in Buffalo last week.
“I just wanted them to figure it out,” Tomlin said. “A guy like (Freiermuth) played in front of 100,000 every weekend. He thinks he’s prepared for it, and he’s not.
If the Steelers rookies struggled to adjust, it wasn’t easy. Of the players listed above, only Loudermilk was inactive. And while neither of those players stood out, none of them made a rookie mistake so bad that the Steelers couldn’t get over it. So maybe Tomlin’s advice might have resonated.
“There is an intensity there that is different from college football. Sixty-five (thousand) to 70 (thousand) can be different from any college environment, and I didn’t want them to be surprised by that, ”Tomlin said.
And with the Bills Mafia in their throats after an appearance in the AFC title game last year, the Super Bowl hype this year and a pandemic that has kept them outside the stadium gates he A season ago, it can be as loud of a frame as those freshman players see in 2021.
However, that “they’re coming to root against you” element that Tomlin describes may not be fully realized until the Steelers travel to Cleveland and Baltimore.
The visits to face the Browns on Halloween and the Ravens in the final week of the season have the potential to be even steeper than what these young players saw in the No.1 Road Game.
Now let’s see what kind of home support they get at Heinz Field at 1 p.m. Sunday for the first home game of the year against the Las Vegas Raiders.
Marcus Mosher is joining me for Thursday’s podcast. He covers Vegas for Raiderswire.com. We take a look at how the Raiders pulled off that insane overtime victory Monday night over the Ravens, the status of a smashed depth chart in the trenches, and how tight winger Darren Waller stirs the drink on offense.
Listen: Benz and Mosher preview the Raiders-Steelers game on Sunday.
Tim Benz is an editor for Tribune-Review. You can contact Tim at [email protected] or via Twitter. All tweets could be reposted. All emails are subject to publication, unless otherwise specified.
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