Now that the 2018 NFL Draft is in the books, and the roster heading into the offseason is close to finalized—though always fluid—it’s time to take stock of where the Pittsburgh Steelers stand. Specifically where Steelers players stand individually based on what we have seen happen over the course of the past few months.
A stock evaluation can take a couple of different approaches and I’ll try to make clear my reasonings. In some cases it will be based on more long-term trends, such as an accumulation of offseason activity. In other instances it will be a direct response to something that just happened. So we can see a player more than once over the course of the summer as we head toward training camp.
Player: Joshua Frazier
Stock Value: Even
There’s just one more draft pick left for us to talk about so far coming out of rookie minicamp, and it’s frankly the only draft pick about which I’ve read absolutely nothing in terms of an accounting of how he performed during that weekend.
That shouldn’t be terribly surprising. It’s probably more difficult to discern anything worthy of noting from a defensive lineman than from any other position on the field without pads on and not going through much of any contact.
Still, Joshua Frazier spoke to the team’s website about his own time during camp, and as far as his own accounting goes, he feels that he did pretty well. He did talk about how having his college defensive line coach, Karl Dunbar, coming in along with him was an aid in helping him to find his footing right off the bat.
He also said that Dunbar was pretty much the same sort of coach that he has seen for the past two years at Alabama. Obviously, the Steelers were attracted to Dunbar because of his coaching style, and he is also a very experienced position coach at the NFL level, so it’s not as though they weren’t already familiar with what he would bring to the table.
Frazier said that he hopes to place the most emphasis this offseason on working on his technique, which he seems to feel is his strength. He believes that is one of the reasons that the Steelers and Dunbar went with him at the end of the draft, so he wants to continue to build upon that.
He has a pretty clear path to the 53-man roster. His primary competition will be fifth-year defensive tackle Daniel McCullers, whom the team has seemingly been hoping to either get rid of or finally light a fire under for years now. Frazier should help to accomplish one of those two things this offseason.
