In 2017, it was a pair of Volunteers. The following year, a couple of Cowboys. At training camp last year, Mike Tomlin often was heard yelling, “Big Blue.”

Then, within a 3½-hour span last Saturday afternoon, the Pittsburgh Steelers took two Terrapins.

It’s become a trend, four consecutive NFL Drafts running, that the Steelers select a pair of teammates on the same weekend.

“We’re always going to have each other’s backs,” sixth-round safety Antoine Brooks said of he and former Maryland teammate Anthony McFarland. “Me and him being in the same locker room is like reunited. We’re just on the next level now.”

This is pretty entertaining. @richeisen got Mike Tomlin to say a lot of really nice things about @UMichFootball on @nflnetwork.

The Steelers drafted Devin Bush and Zach Gentry. pic.twitter.com/Z1Z7hKcjrY

— Brad Galli (@BradGalli) April 28, 2019

Just like how last year, Michigan’s Devin Bush (first round) and Zach Gentry (fifth round) were reunited months after they’d thought they’d played their final games as teammates. In 2018, after quarterback/receiver duo Mason Rudolph and James Washington were done tearing apart the Big 12 for four years at Oklahoma State, they probably couldn’t have envisioned the same team would draft them in the third and second rounds, respectively.

Three years ago, it was Tennessee’s Cameron Sutton (third round) and Josh Dobbs (fourth round) who were selected 31 picks apart by the Steelers.

Mason Rudolph ➡️ James Washington

Steelers fans might want to get used to this Oklahoma State connection ?pic.twitter.com/y3bcw9mMMs

— Yahoo Sports (@YahooSports) September 16, 2019

The Steelers repeatedly deny links between picking college teammates, so much so general manager Kevin Colbert was not even asked about adding two Maryland players during the post-draft video conference call last week.

Even in 2018, when the duo worked extensively together (the other three recent sets of college teammates each featured one offensive and one defensive player), Colbert said of taking Washington in Round 2 and Rudolph in Round 3, “One had nothing to do with the other.”

Tomlin has a pair of strong links to Maryland: His son, Dino, is a freshman receiver for the Terrapins, and his new quarterbacks coach, Matt Canada, served as the team’s interim coach in 2018.

“You can draw the parallels because of the relationships and make a story out of these two,” Tomlin said, “but the reality is we work our tails off to gather intel on everyone that we select, and this one is just probably more obvious from an outside standpoint.”

The Steelers taking two (or more) players from the same school is far from a recent draft phenomenon. They have done it 12 times in the 28 drafts since the annual selection meeting was trimmed down from 12 rounds in 1993 (it was eight rounds that year, the first under unrestricted free agency, and has been seven rounds ever since).

That first draft, 1993, had a pair of paired peculiarities for the Steelers regarding college teammates. Their top two picks (cornerback Deon Figures and linebacker Chad Brown) had played at Colorado. That’s one of only two times college teammates were the Steelers’ first two picks — in 1980, it was Arizona State’s quarterback Mark Malone and defensive end Bob Kohrs.

Then, with fourth- and fifth-round picks, the Steelers took defensive end Kevin Henry and linebacker Mark Woodward, both of Mississippi State.

The next two drafts, the Steelers took things a step further and added THREE players from one college each time: Michigan State’s Myron Bell (fifth round), Jim Miller (sixth) and Brice Abrams (seventh) in 1994, and Nebraska’s Brenden Stai (third round), Donta Jones (fourth) and Barron Miles (sixth) in 1995.

After a 1996 draft in which nine colleges produced the nine-player class, the Steelers took college teammates in three consecutive drafts to close out the century. San Diego State’s Will Blackwell and George Jones and Arizona State’s Jeremy Staat and Jason Simmons went in the second and fifth rounds, respectively, in 1997 and ’98. The Steelers’ final two picks in 1999 were both from Nebraska: seventh rounders Chad Kelsay and Kris Brown.

Steelers drafts in 2005 (Northwestern’s Trai Essex and Noah Herron), 2010 (Ohio State’s Thaddeus Gibson and Doug Worthington) and 2013 (Oklahoma’s Landry Jones and Justin Brown) also featured college teammates.

“After I found out Landry was (drafted), I was excited,” Brown said soon after being picked in the sixth round April 27, 2013. “Then, I got the call an hour or two later, and I was pretty excited about that, too.”

Plenty of other instant Steelers, both before and since, can relate.

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