The 2026 NFL Draft just told us which Steeler is in for a big pay day in 2027

There are two constant truths about the NFL that I think are useful to remember. One is that while football is ever evolving, it is also cyclical. The other is that the NFL is a copycat league. The two often go hand in hand. The NFL saw a passing boom in the 2010s, as teams began throwing the ball at higher rates and began innovating ways for their passing attacks to target and manipulate defenders who weren’t physically equipped to hang in pass coverage. Proof of this is easy enough to notice by looking at the players who take the field now. The 250-pound, run-stuffing linebackers that once were the backbone of NFL defense are all but extinct. They’ve instead been replaced by lighter, faster linebackers, and in some instances, an extra defensive back in lieu of a linebacker altogether. Likewise, on offense, the league meta during the 2010s shifted towards the notion that running backs don’t matter. Running games were still important, but the individuals playing the position became viewed — right or wrong — as more replaceable, and thus the position became largely devalued in the NFL Draft and in contract values. The NFL had become a passing league. But in recent years, that began to shift. In 2020, the league averaged 240.2 passing yards per game, just slightly below the all-time peak set in 2015 (243.8). But that figure has been dropping since. The decline from the 2020 season to the 2021 season (228.3) was not the first time the average has taken a significant plunge — the drop off from 2016 (241.5) to 2015 (224.4) was larger, for example — but whereas the passing numbers bounced back following previous lulls, the average has continued to trend down in the years since 2021. In 2025, the NFL averaged its fewest passing yards per game (209.7) since 2006 (204.8). Some of this trend is due to winning adjustments made by defenses, like the usage of more defensive backs, as well as an increase in split-safety looks and pre-snap coverage disguises. But offenses have started to find their counterpunch. With defenses emphasizing stopping the pass, naturally, offenses are running the ball more. It doesn’t take a genius to look at the smaller linebackers and the use of more defensive backs and come up with the solution that using bigger, more powerful players on offense could swing things back in offenses’ favor. That idea evolved even further in 2025, as more and more teams began to embrace using multi-tight end sets, or using a sixth offensive lineman lined up as a tight end, in the running game. The Steelers were among those teams, using multi-tight end sets at the eighth-highest rate in the league, and using 13 personnel specifically at the second-highest rate, per Sumer Sports.

As we mentioned at the beginning of this article, the NFL is nothing if not a copycat league. There’s usually some scramble to emulate one of the defining traits of each year’s Super Bowl winner, and all you have to do is look at the hiring cycles of the past decade to see how sought-after any shred of the McVay braintrust is. Pair that with a 2026 draft class that was frequently described as “weird” and lacking blue-chip talent, and there was a perfect storm brewing for a tight end revolution. Depending on how you counted two players that were announced as fullbacks — Steelers selection Riley Nowakowski and Vikings selection Max Bredeson — the 2026 class saw a historic amount of tight ends selected. But it wasn’t just that so many tight ends were picked in the draft. It’s when and what types of players were selected. While Oregon’s Kenyon Sadiq — a player who is arguably better as a blocker than as a pass catcher right now — was the only first-round selection, eight tight ends were taken on Day 2 of the draft. That ties 2023, Darnell Washington’s draft class, for the most Day 2 tight ends selected over the past decade. Vanderbilt’s Eli Stowers, a pass catcher who is a tight end in name only, was the second off the board, but that’s when things got interesting. The third tight end off the board wasn’t the highly ranked Max Klare — the Buckeye ended up as the fifth tight end selected, landing with the Rams and their insane glut of tight end talent — but rather Texas A&M’s Nate Boerkircher. Boerkircher and TE4 Marlin Klein from Michigan each had only 38 receptions apiece for their college careers, and were projected to go much later in the draft. I had both featured as selections in my Gems Series due to their abilities as blockers. The third round featured two more of my selections in Stanford’s Sam Roush and Ohio State’s Will Kacmarek, as well as Georgia’s Oscar Delp and Notre Dame’s Eli Raridon.