The flight was fueled and ready to take Pittsburgh Steelers general manager Kevin Colbert and coach Mike Tomlin from Clemson to the second stop on their pro day tour.

Destination: Michigan.

Then, the news trickled down.

The pro day scheduled for March 13 was canceled because of the growing coronavirus outbreak.

Michigan was no longer an option. Other schools were canceling their events, too, and the NFL was putting travel restrictions in place for team personnel.

New destination: Pittsburgh.

Colbert and Tomlin have been grounded here ever since while dealing with a radical change in the draft evaluation process never before seen in the NFL.

Pro days are out. So are in-person visits with prospects at team facilities.

The Steelers, like every other NFL team, are learning to cope.

“It actually hasn’t been too bad,” Colbert said Tuesday in a conference call with reporters. “We’re all in the same boat. We don’t have pro days and most likely will not with restrictions (on self-isolation) put out until April 30. We’re prepared for that.”

Evaluations done during the 2019 season, all-star contests and NFL Combine will have to suffice as the ammunition the Steelers will use to select their six picks in the April 23-25 draft, which will go on as scheduled.

Colbert has kept his in-house schedule intact, too, while working from, well, in his house. Thanks to video chatting services, Colbert, the coaches and scouts have conducted pre-draft meetings for the past 10 days from the comfort of their collective living rooms, home offices and dens.

“In all honesty, we’ve been in meetings for a week and a half, and they’ve gone great,” Colbert said. “So far, so good. We’ve had no complaints.”

Colbert said he and his staff have gotten between “three and four good looks” at the top players in the class.

The process of conducting video chats with prospects begins Thursday for Colbert. Other teams have gotten the jump on virtual interviews, but Colbert didn’t want to deviate from his work schedule.

“We would have been heading back out to pro days starting on Thursday,” Colbert said. “We would have been doing interviews on site and then continue to follow up on visits the following week. The visits we had planned when we got back from the (canceled) owners’ meetings and pro days, the business we had planned, we’re going to follow up by doing a video/audio interview with that player.”

Under normal circumstances, NFL teams are permitted to bring 30 prospects into their team facilities, an allotment that doesn’t count local visitors, which for the Steelers includes players from West Virginia and Pitt, among other schools.

This spring, teams can talk via phone or computer to a prospect up to three times a week for a maximum of one hour each session. They can interview these players over multiple weeks as long as teams stay within the three-times, one-hour guidelines. All interviews will cease April 22, the day before the draft.

“It’s not as good as sitting down in person, obviously” Colbert said, “but we’ll make the most of it and we’ll get the information we need.”

Because of social distancing guidelines, the three-day draft will be done remotely under a hub-and-spoke system, with commissioner Roger Goodell announcing picks from the hub and the 32 teams working from the spoke.

After trading away his first-round pick in September to acquire Pro Bowl safety Minkah Fitzpatrick, Colbert doesn’t expect to be active until the second day. He called it “highly unlikely” the Steelers would have the pieces necessary to trade into the top round.

“With the depth in this draft,” Colbert said, “I feel good about what we can get in the second round and beyond.”

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