Mike Tomlin gives amazing, candid answer on Kenny Pickett's small hands

NFL Draft prospects are fit under a microscope in the months leading up to draft day, and none more so than former Pitt quarterback Kenny Pickett, whose hands apparently can’t be seen under said microscope because they’re so small.

Jokes aside, Pickett’s hands measured in at less than nine inches during his pre draft process and it was a real concern at the time the news came out. Questions regarding his hand size, which is unusually small for a NFL quarterback, swirled around social media over the next several; days. Some even wondered if it would hurt Pickett’s draft stock.

For Pittsburgh Steelers head coach Mike Tomlin, Pickett’s hand size isn’t something Tomlin is worried will provide the first round draft choice problems throughout his tenure in the league.

“I potentially was capable of buying into that if I didn’t watch him play college football in Pittsburgh and deal with the elements that comes with playing in this environment,” Tomlin said about Pickett’s hands. “You can get into the hand-size thing, or you can just look at how he performed in a variety of conditions, and we have those conditions here in Pittsburgh. There’s very little speculation, from my perspective, about how he might handle the ball [during] inclement weather, wet days, etc.

“They played North Carolina here on a Thursday night. I actually went to the game, and it was raining pretty good that night. [Pickett] had no issues and so it was probably less of an issue for us as it was just in terms of some of the draft chatter.”

Steelers general manager Kevin Colbert, who is retiring after the dust settles on the draft, also discussed how much of a factor the organization considered Pickett’s hand size before drafting him.

“Honestly, I never paid attention to that,” Colbert said to ProFootballTalk’s Mike Florio. “We look at the results. We watch Kenny play in our environment. . . . Can he throw the football? Absolutely. Did he have an excessive fumble rate? No, he didn’t. We just judge it on how he played.”

Pickett had a season to remember in 2021, finishing as a Heisman Trophy finalist while completing 334 of his 497 passes for 4,319 yards, 42 touchdowns and just seven interceptions while completing 67.3 percent of his passes. His hands weren’t a problem during any of it, and no one in Pittsburgh’s front office believes it’ll be one as the rookie fights for his spot on the depth chart heading into his first season with the Steelers.