Toledo safety Emmanuel McNeil-Warren appears headed to being a late first-round draft pick later this month.
McNeil-Warren has become a popular top-30 visitor.
He is currently visiting the Dolphins in Miami after recent visits with the Patriots, Browns, Cowboys and Falcons, according to Jordan Schultz of The Schultz Report. McNeil-Warren will head to Pittsburgh after finishing in Miami today.
McNeil-Warren earned second-team All-American honors last season when he totaled 77 tackles, three forced fumbles, two interceptions and seven passes defensed.
Dane Brugler of TheAthletic.com ranks McNeil-Warren as his 23rd-best player in the draft, third among safeties.
Steelers Clips
The Steelers traded for Michael Pittman Jr. last month and they may not be done adding to their wide receiver room.
Field Yates of ESPN reports that they will host Denzel Boston on a pre-draft visit on Tuesday. Boston has also had reported visits with the Browns and Raiders.
Boston caught 125 passes for 1,715 yards and 20 touchdowns at Washington over the last two seasons.
The Steelers have DK Metcalf along with Pittman at the top of their receiver depth chart. Both of those wideouts are listed at 6-foot-4 and Boston is listed at the same height, so Pittsburgh would have a bevy of big targets should they add the wideout in the draft later this month.
Steelers cornerback Joey Porter Jr. doesn’t think he’s getting the recognition he deserves after three years in the league.
Porter was a second-round pick in 2023 and has been a starter for almost all of his time in Pittsburgh. He has not been credited with a touchdown against him since the middle of his rookie season and there’s some dispute about whether or not that should be on him because of the coverage the team was in at the time.
It’s a strong mark in his favor either way as is the low completion percentage opposing teams have accumulated while throwing his way, which is why Porter said on the Blueprint podcast that he thinks he’s been a top-five corner since his rookie season. He also said he thinks he’s unfairly maligned because he committed too many penalties during his second season.
”That’s what people really harp on my game about, is the PI’s and penalties,” Porter said.” But it’s like, you hold no other DB under that microscope or grade them under just — I haven’t gave up a touchdown in three years. Not one. No wide receiver put over 50, 60 yards on my head alone and I travel with the best of them. And they want to talk about penalties. Even to bring up penalties this year. I had five, which equaled out to 50-something yards. You’re saying I’m not top-five because I had 50 yards in penalties? Like that’s crazy.”
Porter is eligible for a contract extension this offseason and the push the Steelers make to give him one will be a sign about where they fall in the debate about Porter’s play.
Free agent running back Najee Harris visited the Raiders on Friday, according to the NFL’s transactions report.
He previously visited the Seahawks.
Ashton Jeanty, a first-round pick in 2025, is the Raiders’ starting running back, with Dylan Laube and Chris Collier also on the roster.
Harris is working his way back from a torn Achilles. He was injured in a Sept. 21 game against the Broncos while playing for the Chargers.
Harris, who signed with the Chargers as a free agent last March, landed on the non-football injury list ahead of last summer’s training camp after a fireworks accident. He missed all the Chargers’ training camp practices but returned for the beginning of the season.
The 2021 first-round pick spent his first four seasons with the Steelers and ran for 4,312 yards during his time in Pittsburgh.
Offseason programs will start getting underway around the NFL next week.
The ten teams that hired new coaches this offseason will be eligible to start working with their players on Monday, April 6. The Ravens are the only team that has set that as their first day of work while the Cardinals, Falcons, Bills, Browns, Raiders, Dolphins, Giants, Steelers and Titans have set Tuesday as their opening day.
All of those teams will also be able to hold a voluntary minicamp later in the spring. Every team is also scheduled to hold a rookie minicamp and a mandatory minicamp over the course of the next few months.
The first two weeks of work for all teams is limited to meetings, strength and conditioning, and physical rehabilitation only. The three-week second phase allows for on-field work, but no full-speed team drills while the third OTA phase allows for team drills, but there is no live contact allowed at any point in the offseason.
Most of the 22 teams with returning coaches will be opening their offseason programs on April 20 or 21. The Broncos have set May 4 as their first day.
The Bengals are adding to their secondary.
Cincinnati has reached a one-year agreement with safety Kyle Dugger, ESPN’s Adam Schefter reports.
Dugger, 30, spent the second half of last season with the Steelers, starting nine games after being traded from the Patriots. He tallied 42 total tackles with five passes defensed and two interceptions.
A second-round pick in 2020, Dugger spent his first five-plus seasons with New England. He’s appeared in 90 career games with 78 starts, recording 11 interceptions with 29 passes defensed.
Acrisure Stadium, which opened as Heinz Field in 2001, has been characterized by an endless ocean of yellow seats. That finally will be changing.
Via Chris Adamski of the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review, Steelers owner Art Rooney II said that black seats are being installed in the upper deck of the venue.
“We were making changes to the seating,” Rooney said. “The sea of gold sometimes gets overwhelming, so we did a little black and gold in there this time around.”
Rooney said it will be a “random pattern.” The practical impact will be to deaden the retina-searing impact of empty seats in the facility, which happens when the place clears out early during a Steelers game or throughout a Pitt home game.
It’s a smart move, albeit long overdue. The bright yellow was too much. Sprinkling in black seats will make the visual impact far less jarring.
Five years ago, then-Packers quarterback Aaron Rodgers hijacked (perhaps not intentionally) the draft-day news cycle with word that the 49ers nearly traded for him. It prompted speculation throughout round one of the 2021 draft that a trade could happen, with the Broncos emerging as a potential candidate.
It didn’t happen, obviously. Rodgers, the 2020 NFL MVP, won the 2021 NFL MVP award before spending one more year in Green Bay.
Now, with (to date) only the Steelers linked to Rodgers during the 2026 free-agency cycle, Denver has potentially re-entered the chat.
There’s talk of the Broncos possibly bringing Rodgers in for a visit. The motivation comes from the possibility that current starter Bo Nix won’t be fully and completely back to 100 percent when Week 1 rolls around.
This notion conflicts with recent comments from Broncos owner Greg Penner, who declared at the NFL’s annual meeting that Nix is “ahead of schedule” from the broken ankle he suffered late in the playoff win over the Bills and should be good to go for OTAs.
Beyond the basic question of whether Nix will be healthy is whether Nix gives the Broncos the best chance to get to the Super Bowl and win it. Coach Sean Payton, who like any coach who has won a Super Bowl with one team is keenly aware that no coach has won a Super Bowl with two different franchises, may be tempted to roll the dice on a possible one-year upgrade (if Rodgers would truly be an upgrade) in order to finish the work the Broncos started in 2025.
For Payton, the possibility of blazing a new trail for NFL coaches could be the thing that gets him to Canton. If he thinks Rodgers gives them a better chance to win the Super Bowl than Nix, why wouldn’t Payton at least ponder the possibility?
From Rodgers’s perspective, which team gives him a better chance to walk away with a second Lombardi Trophy in his back pocket, the Steelers or the Broncos?
It’s all very early. And it’s not an April Fool’s Day gag. The Broncos could be turning to Rodgers, at a time when the Steelers have assumed the position for the second straight offseason.
If — and for now it’s a big if — Rodgers ends up in Denver, he wouldn’t play the Packers (unless the two teams meet in the Super Bowl, for the first time since the 1997 season). But he would make visits to the Jets, the Steelers, and one more trip to San Francisco, the team he wanted to draft him in 2005 and the team that tried to trade for him in 2021.
The Lions had added some depth to their secondary.
Detroit announced on Tuesday that the club has signed safety Chuck Clark.
Clark, who turns 31 in April, spent last season with the Steelers. He appeared in 15 contests with five starts, playing 44 percent of defensive snaps and 48 percent of special teams snaps in games played.
Clark previously played the 2024 season with the Jets, starting 12 games. While he missed the 2023 season with a torn ACL, Clark played his first six seasons with the Ravens, starting 63 games for the club.
In 123 career appearances with 80 starts, Clark has registered five interceptions, 37 passes defensed, seven forced fumbles, and 4.5 sacks.
With Patrick Mahomes on the mend from a torn ACL suffered late in the 2025 season, there’s certainly a chance he won’t be ready for the start of the regular season.
That’s part of why Kansas City traded for Justin Fields to be the team’s backup QB.
The No. 11 pick of the 2021 draft, Fields has plenty of experience for a backup, having started 53 games for the Bears, Steelers, and Jets over the last five seasons.
But while Fields has been more effective as a runner than a passer in the league, Chiefs head coach Andy Reid noted on Tuesday how the different elements of Fields’ skillset can fit within the offense.
“I like his game,” Reid said at the annual league meeting on Tuesday. “He can do the drop back game, he can do the movement stuff, play-action — whether it’s a naked or a sprint-out game. He has that whole package that he can do. He understands the screen game, understands how to set it up. He obviously — he’s going to be one of the better athletes on the field when he’s out there. He’s fast, big, likes to play the game. So, I mean, all the stuff I like.”
Given Fields’ athleticism, talk seems to follow the quarterback wherever he goes that there could be some sort of package to get him on the field at a different position. Reid effectively said he’s not planning much for that, but the head coach also didn’t close the door on that idea.
“We’ll see how that goes. I’ll talk with him and see where he’s at with that,” Reid said. “But he’s more than a gadget guy, that’s not how I’m looking at it. That’s not why we brought him in. We brought him in to play quarterback if he’s needed to play quarterback.
“And then whatever goes from there — if he gets bored, we’ll have a couple of things for him,” Reid added with a chuckle.
Fields rushed for 1,143 yards with eight touchdowns in 2022, leading the league at 7.1 yards per carry.
Last season for New York, Fields started nine games, compiling a 2-7 record. He completed 62.7 percent of his passes for 1,1259 yards with seven touchdowns and one interception. He took 71 carries for 383 yards with four TDs, which works out to 5.4 yards per attempt.
