The NFL scheduled a trial run with owners, general managers and coaches Monday afternoon to work out the kinks of the league’s first virtual draft.

The Pittsburgh Steelers, in essence, will conduct a second one Thursday night.

With the Steelers being one of six teams without a first-round pick, team executives can merely sit and watch while the first round unfolds.

“It’s going to be a spectator’s view,” coach Mike Tomlin said in a video conference call with reporters. “It’s going to be a good opportunity for us to get comfortable with the organization of all of this in terms of how the draft is unfolding and how communication is happening and trades.

“I think there are some unintended consequences and benefits of not having a first-round pick.”

The Steelers lost their first-round selection when they traded it to the Miami Dolphins in September for safety Minkah Fitzpatrick — not knowing obviously a coronavirus pandemic would alter the landscape of the league’s draft seven months later.

And so it is that the Steelers, barring a trade, won’t dive head first into the draft until Friday night when they hold the No. 49 overall pick. They also will make a pick late in the third round Friday with the No. 102 overall choice.

Throughout the draft, team president Art Rooney II, general manager Kevin Colbert, executive Omar Khan and Tomlin will be connected via video conference from their respective homes. They will have a draft board set up at their locations and will be connected virtually.

Steelers assistant coaches and scouts will have access to this virtual draft room in order to provide input on the team’s selections.

“What we have available to us is if we were sitting in a room together,” Colbert said.

Colbert said the Steelers conducted interviews with 125 prospects, with the majority occurring at the Senior Bowl in January and the NFL Combine in February. The final 37 interviews were done over the past three weeks via video conferencing.

From the list of prospects, Colbert said the Steelers have a pool of 140 from which they would like to make their six selections. The Steelers also have two fourth-round picks, a sixth-rounder and a seventh-rounder.

“We’ll get some that will start, some that will compete as starters, some that will back up and some that will compete with our backups,” Colbert said.

When the NFL barred travel in early March after the coronavirus pandemic began spreading throughout the country, the Steelers immediately jumped into three weeks of draft preparation meetings with their scouts and assistants.

“There never was a feeling of being rushed through the developmental process,” Tomlin said. “We were able to adjust to unusual circumstances. It’s been a good process.”

Colbert also thinks the Steelers have made the most of a complicated situation, one the NFL has never faced before.

“We have absolutely no complaints,” he said.

Because of the pandemic, NFL teams didn’t get 40-yard dash times on 74 prospects, while 76 players had “incomplete physicals.”

Colbert and Tomlin attended just one college pro day — at Clemson — before the NFL shut down travel. By not having to jet across the country to visit prospects, the duo was provided more time to watch video of prospects.

“Being quarantined, I’ve had an opportunity to look at another game or two on a guy we are discussing,” Tomlin said. “With that video at our fingertips, isolation has provided opportunities to take a deeper dive on players and there’s a level of comfort from that perspective.”

The quarantine also has provided Colbert a chance to gain more intelligence on players who will be selected on Day 3 of the draft — or players who could be signed us undrafted players.

“We were on every call, every meeting than we have been in the past for lower-round guys,” Colbert said. “I feel better knowing more about drafting the lower picks and free agent types than I did before.”

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