Mike Tomlin had a creative message for his rookies before their 1st road game in Buffalo - TribLIVE

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All nine of the Steelers’ 2021 draft class members came from Power 5 conference programs.

One benefit of that is the players come to the NFL having a feel for big-time football. The daily mechanisms and framework that exist on that scale. The pressures and expectations associated with being a small piece of a multibillion-dollar engine.

The spotlight and the hype. Oh, and the crowd noise.

A lot of stadiums across the NCAA are bigger than NFL buildings in terms of the actual crowd on gameday.

For example, Heinz Field’s capacity is currently 68,400. Highmark Stadium in Buffalo is 71,208. The top two draft picks, Najee Harris and Pat Freiermuth, are from Alabama and Penn State, respectively. Both of their college stadiums (Bryant-Denny Stadium and Beaver Stadium) have a capacity in excess of 100,000 people.

Both of those players also have played in road stadiums that seat at least that many. So they know what it’s like to play in front of a vocal, noisy crowd. So do Kendrick Green, Buddy Johnson, Dan Moore Jr., Isaiahh Loudermilk, Tre Norwood and Pressley Harvin III.

But as Steelers coach Mike Tomlin pointed out at his news conference this week, measuring crowd noise through the sheer volume of human beings in the seats is different than gauging a level of hostility.

As Tomlin suggests, a crowd of 75,000-80,000 in a pro stadium can create an entirely different type of anxiousness. Especially for rookies.

“You go to college environments, the home team (fans) root for their team. You go to a professional environment, they root against the visitor,” Tomlin said Tuesday.

And that was a point Tomlin said he tried to drive home to as many of his first-year players as he could in advance of the opener in Buffalo last week.

“I just wanted them to understand it,” Tomlin said. “A guy like (Freiermuth) has played in front of 100,000 every weekend. He thinks he’s prepared for that, and he’s not.”

If the Steelers’ rookies had any trouble adjusting, it wasn’t apparent. Of the players listed above, only Loudermilk was inactive. And while none of those players stood out, none of them had a rookie mistake so bad that the Steelers couldn’t overcome it. So perhaps Tomlin’s words of advice may have resonated.

“There’s an intensity there that’s different than college football. Sixty-five (thousand) to 70 (thousand) can be unlike any college environment, and I didn’t want them to be surprised by that,” Tomlin said.

And with the Bills Mafia in full throat after an AFC title game appearance last year, Super Bowl hype this year and a pandemic that kept them outside of the stadium gates a season ago, that may be as raucous of a setting that these first-year players see in 2021.

However, that “they come to root against you” element Tomlin described may not be fully realized until the Steelers travel to Cleveland and Baltimore.

Visits to face the Browns on Halloween and the Ravens during the last week of the season have the potential to be on tilt even more than what those young players witnessed in road game No.1.

Now let’s see what kind of home support they get at Heinz Field at 1 p.m. Sunday for the first home game of the year against the Las Vegas Raiders.

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Marcus Mosher joins me for Thursday’s podcast. He covers Vegas for Raiderswire.com. We look at how the Raiders pulled off that wild overtime victory Monday night over the Ravens, the status of a banged-up depth chart in the trenches and how tight end Darren Waller stirs the drink on offense.

Listen: Benz and Mosher preview the Raiders-Steelers game on Sunday.

Tim Benz is a Tribune-Review staff writer. You can contact Tim at tbenz@triblive.com or via Twitter. All tweets could be reposted. All emails are subject to publication unless specified otherwise.

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