In my years as Minnesota Vikings general manager and Tennessee Titans president, I had a standard speech I would make to our player personnel\/scouting staff and coaches as we entered Day 3 of the NFL draft.<\/p>\n
I’d say the draft is an inexact science and emphasize that there are great, Hall of Fame-caliber players in every round. We needed to identify and select such players in Rounds 4-7.<\/p>\n
Some of those players will develop into future starters, depth players and special teams standouts who will have an outsized impact on their teams and the league at large. A select few might even join the list of the best late-round draft steals in NFL history.<\/p>\n
To determine which players merit that distinction right now, we considered their career longevity, number of Super Bowls and postseason success, overall career production, career accolades\/honors, and position impact. Elite quarterbacks, pass-rushers, wide receivers, offensive tackles and shutdown corners will generally rank higher, which coincides with their salaries usually being the highest position-wise. <\/p>\n
Draft round was also a key factor. A star seventh-round pick is a bigger steal than a fourth-round pick if both have similar stats\/accolades\/impact.<\/p>\n
With that in mind, we’ve ranked the 25 best late-round NFL draft steals of the modern era (since the NFL\/AFL merger in 1970).<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"In my years as Minnesota Vikings general manager and Tennessee Titans president, I had a standard speech I…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":609087,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[63],"tags":[349,99],"class_list":["post-609086","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-nfl","tag-nfl","tag-sports"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/609086","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=609086"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/609086\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/609087"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=609086"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=609086"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=609086"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}