Throughout their recent history, the Pittsburgh Steelers have been especially and specifically adept at selecting smaller receivers from smaller schools in the middle rounds, and turning them into stars. There is no better example than Antonio Brown, who the team took out of Western Michigan in the sixth round of the 2010 draft. We tend to forget this now in light of Brown’s… erratic behavior, but in his prime, he was the best route-runner in the game, and he could put just about any cornerback in a blender. There was Mike Wallace the year before, there was Emmanuel Sanders in the same draft that brought them Brown, and this year, there was Memphis’ Calvin Austin in the fourth round.
There was also Toledo’s Diontae Johnson, taken out of Toledo in the 2019 draft. At 5-foot-10 and 183 pounds, Johnson perfectly fit that prototype, and he’s coming off his first 1,000-yard receiving season, despite a passing game that was severely limited in the intermediate and deep levels.
