Eli Heidenreich, a guide to the Navy record-setter the Steelers drafted at home

A Mt. Lebanon kid with a Super Bowl memory

Heidenreich comes from Mt. Lebanon, a Pittsburgh suburb, and his senior season there reads like a typo. He caught 54 passes for 1,325 yards and 28 touchdowns, and the team won a state championship, according to his Wikipedia biography. Navy's roster page adds that the Post-Gazette named him its 6A Player of the Year and that he was first-team all-state. He also played baseball.

Asked by the Steelers for his earliest memory of the team, he did not pick a trophy or a parade. He picked one play: James Harrison's 100-yard interception return in the Super Bowl win over Arizona. That game was played on February 1, 2009. Heidenreich was five years old. I love that answer, because it is exactly the play a five-year-old would remember: a very large man running a very long way while everyone in the room stands up.

The Navy connection runs in the family. His roster biography notes that his grandfather and uncle both served in the Navy, and at Annapolis he majored in cyber operations, which is not the light academic load people sometimes imagine for a Division I athlete.

What he did at Navy

Navy lists him as a slot back, a hybrid position that sits somewhere between running back and receiver. That is why his numbers look lopsided for someone the Steelers now call a running back. He never had more than 77 carries in a season. He did most of his damage catching the ball.

Two games tell the story better than the table. On October 4, 2025, against Air Force, he caught 8 passes for 243 yards and three touchdowns of 19, 80 and 60 yards in a 34-31 Navy win. The old Navy single-game receiving mark was 179 yards, shared by Rob Taylor from a 1967 game against Vanderbilt and Dave King from 1976 against Notre Dame. He did not nudge that record. He cleared it by 64 yards.

Six weeks later, on November 15, 2025, Navy beat No. 25 South Florida 41-38. Heidenreich caught five passes for 146 yards and passed Rob Taylor's career receiving total of 1,736 yards, compiled from 1965 to 1967. A record that had stood for 58 years finally fell, and it fell to a slot back from Pittsburgh.

Here is the detail I would not want you to miss from that same afternoon. Navy's fullback, Alex Tecza, ran 12 times for 126 yards, including a 76-yard touchdown. According to Navy's roster biography, Tecza was Heidenreich's high school teammate at Mt. Lebanon. Two kids from the same suburban high school, both having big days in the same upset of a ranked team. Head coach Brian Newberry said afterward that it was "the football team I have been waiting to see all year long."

Draft night in his own backyard

The 2026 draft was held in Pittsburgh, and Heidenreich was in the green room when his name came up late in the seventh round. OutKick's account describes him walking out in Full Dress Blues, pulling on the cap and saluting, and says the league let him walk through the crowd before taking him to the ESPN set. General manager Omar Khan, quoted by Steelers.com, put it simply: "You can't help but get emotional."

Seventh-round picks are long shots. Heidenreich made the 53-man roster anyway, on August 30, 2026, after a preseason in which he ran 9 times for 35 yards and a touchdown in the finale against Buffalo, according to Sports Illustrated's Steelers site. He had also shaken off a hamstring injury from early August to get there.

Does he still owe the Marine Corps?

Yes, and this is the part most people get wrong. Heidenreich graduated from the Naval Academy on May 22, 2026, and was commissioned into the Marine Corps Reserve. In comments published by Steelers.com, he said football gets all of his attention for now, with the military possibly asking him to do some public events in the offseason.

EssentiallySports reported that he is under a ten-year agreement and quoted him saying he originally committed to five years of service afterward, with the Marines allowing him to pursue football first. That arrangement exists because of a recent change in federal law that lets a small number of academy graduates each year go straight into the Selected Reserve and serve partly by helping with recruiting. The rules have flipped back and forth for a decade, and our companion piece lays out how today's route compares with the old two-year active-duty requirement.

We could not find a public copy of his individual service agreement, so the exact terms beyond what he and the reporting describe are not something I can confirm. What is clear is the direction: the obligation is deferred, not erased.

What to watch from here

Early in the 2026 season, the Steelers' stats page credited him with three kickoff returns for 73 yards and a long of 26. PressBox reported that his first regular-season action included returns of 23 and 24 yards against Atlanta on September 13. That is the realistic job for a seventh-round rookie: special teams first, a few offensive snaps when the matchup calls for a back who can catch.

My honest read is that the versatility that made his Navy numbers look strange is also what gives him a chance to stick. A slot back is trained to line up in the backfield, split out wide and block on the edge, sometimes on consecutive plays. Our second companion piece traces how that role translates to an NFL running back room. Whether he becomes a regular or not, the part of this story that already happened is the good part: the kid who remembered Harrison's run got to hear his own name called in the stadium where Harrison's team plays.

"It's really humbling," he told PressBox in September, "just to think about my experience growing up in Pittsburgh and all the games that I watched."