Derrick Harmon – Detroit Kid, Oregon Breakout, Steelers First-Rounder
From Detroit to the NFL Draft Stage
Three-star recruit out of Loyola High School in Detroit. Michigan State offered – so did Memphis, Ole Miss, Purdue. He chose the Spartans. Nothing about that recruiting class suggested a top-21 NFL pick was coming.
Derrick Harmon was born August 3, 2003. By April 2025 he was sitting in the green room while the Pittsburgh Steelers called his name with pick No. 21, becoming the first defensive tackle taken in the first round by Pittsburgh since Cam Heyward in 2011. Fourteen years between those two picks. Mike Tomlin said afterward the Steelers had identified Harmon as someone they would not trade away from – their words at the Combine, confirmed again at his top-30 facility visit, hardened into certainty on draft night.
He stands 6-foot-4 and weighs 313 pounds. His arms measure just over 34 inches. His wingspan is 84 inches, which ranks in the 90th percentile among interior defensive linemen. At the Combine he ran two 40-yard dash times under five seconds, which Bleacher Report used to name him the biggest winner among all defensive tackle prospects in Indianapolis. Bleacher Report doesn’t hand that out for being big. You have to be big and fast, and Harmon was both.
His four-year rookie contract came in at $17,973,596 fully guaranteed, with a fifth-year club option. For context, that’s what the Steelers believed the future of their defensive line was worth locking in before he played a single NFL snap.
Three Years at Michigan State, One Year That Changed Everything
The Michigan State years are easy to summarize because nothing about them was dramatic. As a freshman in 2021 he played four games to protect his redshirt. In 2022 he started five of 12 games – 30 tackles, three for loss, two sacks. In 2023 he started 10 of 12 – 40 tackles, 3.5 for loss, 1.5 sacks, a forced fumble. Solid. Unremarkable. Not the kind of production that puts scouts on planes.
He transferred to Oregon in May 2024. One season. Fourteen games started. The numbers: 45 tackles, 10.5 tackles for loss, five sacks, four pass breakups, two forced fumbles, two fumble recoveries. He was named second-team AP All-American and second-team All-Big Ten by the media. But the number that actually moved his stock was 55 – quarterback pressures generated, most of any interior defensive lineman in the FBS. Twelfth among all FBS players regardless of position. Scouts pay attention to pressures in a way that casual box scores don’t capture, because pressures are where sacks come from before they happen.
The Oregon defense used him everywhere – zero-technique over the center, three-technique in the B-gap, out to a five-technique on the edge. That versatility isn’t something coaches install in one season. It’s something a player brings, and Harmon brought it.
One honest knock on his college tape: finishing. He generated disruption at an elite rate and converted it into sacks at a good-but-not-elite rate. That gap between pressures and production is the thing scouts circled. It’s also, for what it’s worth, the thing that’s fixable.
Why the Steelers Took Him Over a Quarterback
Pittsburgh had been connected to Shedeur Sanders for months before the draft. The speculation was loud enough that passing on him at 21 felt like a statement. General manager Omar Khan and assistant GM Andy Weidl didn’t see it that way. They’d spent two consecutive drafts building the offensive line – Broderick Jones in 2023, Troy Fautanu in 2024. The defense hadn’t gotten a first-round pick since linebacker Devin Bush in 2019. The playoff loss to Baltimore in January 2025 – 299 rushing yards allowed – made the need obvious.
The Steelers didn’t address their defensive interior in free agency. That was the tell. When a team has a clear need and skips it in March, they’re saving it for April.
Harmon was the second defensive tackle off the board nationally, behind Michigan’s Mason Graham. He came to Pittsburgh with Cam Heyward – seven-time Pro Bowler, future Hall of Famer, 35 years old – still anchoring the line. The plan was never for Harmon to replace Heyward immediately. It was for Harmon to learn from him, play beside him, and eventually become him. Keeanu Benton was already developing into a legitimate interior presence. With Harmon added, Pittsburgh’s defensive line interior had a plausible argument for being the best young pairing in the AFC for the next decade. Before Harmon played a down, Benton said it plainly: “We need him.”
What He Actually Does on a Football Field
The scouting reports on Harmon agree on a few things. His upper body strength is genuinely unusual for a player his age – he can knock a blocker back on contact, control the engagement point, and disengage without losing gap integrity. Against double teams, he sinks his hips, widens his base, and doesn’t get washed. Splitting combo blocks – two blockers working in concert – is something most interior linemen lose against. Harmon does it with regularity.
His hands are quick. The rip move is his primary pass-rush weapon, and he uses it to win both as a penetrator and as the pick player in line stunts with edge rushers. His 10-plus inch hands (10 3/8 at the Combine) help him gain control and extend at the point of attack in a way that smaller-handed linemen can’t replicate.
Where it gets complicated: pad level. He plays too high at times against veteran blockers, which shortens his leverage and lets guards recover after initial contact. It didn’t hurt him much in the Big Ten – Oregon’s defensive front created too many problems for individual blockers to consistently exploit it. NFL guards are better. This is the adjustment every young interior lineman makes, and Harmon made progress on it during his rookie year. He wasn’t fixed by Week 12. He was better in Week 12 than Week 3, which is the right direction.
Schematically, the best fit is as a 2i-technique in an even front. Pittsburgh runs a 3-4, which means his natural home is inside the B-gap, where his strength and length play up. The 3-4 also means T.J. Watt and Alex Highsmith eat most of the sacks. Interior linemen in this system create conditions, they don’t accumulate stats. Heyward proved a 10-sack season was possible from that spot – but it took years of development to get there.
The player comparison that comes up most from scouts who watched extensive film: Kenny Clark. Green Bay’s three-time Pro Bowler, drafted 27th overall in 2016. Similar size profile, similar burst, similar role in a system that doesn’t maximize his counting stats. That’s the high-end projection. The most likely comp, adjusting for realistic development curves, is Christian Wilkins – productive, versatile, durable interior presence who makes his team’s defense measurably better without dominating a statistical category.
The Injury, the Debut, and What the Rookie Year Actually Looked Like
August 21. Preseason finale against the Carolina Panthers. Harmon sprains his MCL. The initial reports were worse than the diagnosis turned out to be – he avoided surgery – but he missed the first two regular-season games regardless. He was the second consecutive Steelers first-round pick to miss Week 1 due to a preseason injury, after Troy Fautanu in 2024. Pittsburgh fans had been here before. It didn’t make it easier to watch.
He was upgraded to full practice participation on the Friday before Week 3. Defensive coordinator Teryl Austin said they’d be judicious with his snaps. He made his NFL debut September 21 in a 21-14 win over the New England Patriots and recorded a sack.
He didn’t ease in. Bleacher Report’s Brad Gagnon gave him an A-minus through Week 4 – one of only nine first-round rookies to grade that high or higher. “The former Oregon star is off to a splendid start, albeit in a limited sample,” Gagnon wrote. In his first two games: three tackles, one for loss, two quarterback hits, one pass deflection that forced an interception against Minnesota. His PFF grade through those weeks was 55.4 – not elite, but legitimate, and seventh among all rookie defensive linemen in Week 4.
Then a second knee injury in Week 12. Different knee from the preseason, unrelated to the MCL. He missed three more games. Harmon talked about it later in the season: “It’s part of the game, so I’ve just got to stay optimistic and really just stay on course.” The first injury he handled poorly by his own admission. The second time he showed up to meetings in street clothes and prepared like he was playing. That’s not nothing.
Final regular-season line: 12 games, 446 snaps, 27 tackles, 3 sacks, 1 tackle for loss, 1 fumble recovery, 1 pass deflection. In the playoff loss he added 6 tackles and another sack. Steelers Depot ranked him second among all first-round defensive tackle peers by production across 12 games. Steel City Underground graded Pittsburgh’s defensive line unit third in PFF Wins Above Replacement for the entire NFL. That’s a group number – Heyward, Benton, and depth pieces all contributed – but Harmon was part of it despite the lost time.
In December the Pittsburgh chapter of the PFWA voted him the team’s 2025 Rookie of the Year. He received the Joe Greene Great Performance Award – the first defensive lineman in franchise history to win it. The first first-round defender to take it home since Devin Bush in 2019. He beat out a draft class that included Carson Bruener, a seventh-round pick who earned PFWA All-Rookie honors on special teams, and Jack Sawyer, a fourth-rounder who logged two interceptions and a defensive touchdown. Harmon won anyway. The baseline expectation for a 21st overall pick is higher than for a seventh-rounder, but the voters saw enough to make the call.
What Year 2 Looks Like – and What It Actually Requires
Two knee injuries in one season is a flag. Not a crisis – neither required surgery, and Harmon’s size and athletic profile don’t suggest a structurally fragile player – but two separate soft-tissue issues in a rookie year is the kind of thing a training staff monitors carefully in the offseason. If he stays healthy across 17 games in 2026, everything else follows. At 446 snaps across 12 games his rookie year, a full season at even a slightly higher snap percentage projects to 650-plus snaps. That’s when pass-rush numbers start looking real.
Steelers Depot framed the real question well: can Harmon eventually be the player who makes others better, the way Heyward has made everyone around him better for 14 years? Right now he benefits from playing next to Heyward. The defensive line’s third-ranked PFF WAR doesn’t happen without the veteran anchor drawing attention. Harmon will have to learn to be that anchor. Probably not in Year 2. Maybe not in Year 3. But that’s why Pittsburgh invested a first-round pick.
The pass-rush ceiling is genuinely open. His 55 FBS pressures in 2024 ranked 12th in the country among all positions – not just interior linemen. Converting that pressure rate into NFL sacks, as he develops counter moves beyond the rip, is the developmental line to watch. Three sacks in 12 games as a rookie in a system that depresses interior sack numbers is not a bad start. Heyward’s career in Pittsburgh shows what’s possible at that position in that scheme with time. Harmon has the physical profile. Whether the rest develops at the same pace – that’s what the next three seasons will answer.
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