The offseason is over. Football is back. The Pittsburgh Steelers are back in Latrobe at Saint Vincent College and training camp is underway. As we are every year, we will be right there providing live feedback and updates, and will be supplementing ourselves throughout the day, every day.
The Steelers are coming off a frustrating season to say the least, posting a 13-3 record with a first-round bye only to be dumped in the Divisional Round by a team that beat them twice, even though they hadn’t even been to the playoffs in a decade.
They’ve added the ingredients that they think they need to fix what ails them, adding new players and coaches, while getting rid of others. Now is when they start mixing up those ingredients and trying to create something powerful.
We still have a lot of questions about this team, and we’ll be monitoring the practices and preseason games looking for answers. As we always do.
Question: How much time will Ramon Foster miss?
Steelers veteran left guard Ramon Foster appeared to suffer a right knee injury early in yesterday’s practice, the first with pads on of the year. The initial impression from many who saw the incident and its aftermath expressed concern that it was a serious injury, perhaps even a season-ending one, but there was optimism of him escaping a bad break toward the end of the way.
We still don’t know for sure what the exact nature is of his injury as of the time of this writing (and hopefully as of its publication), which also means that we don’t have any clear perception about a timeline for return.
While Foster has missed a few games during seasons here and there—he sat out three games just last year—he has had the good fortune of escaping any serious injuries and has generally displayed a much-needed durability, making over 100 starts over his nine-year career.
A full-time starter since 2013 (and having started all 16 games in 2012 as well due to injury), it’s been a long time since he could be even reasonably regarded as anything but an established player. Head Coach Mike Tomlin was entirely right when he called Foster a core player yesterday after practice.
For however much time he might miss, B.J. Finney is the likely player to take his place. The third-year interior lineman has already made five starts at left guard replacing Foster due to injury over the course of the past two years, so it’s nothing new to him.
Foster is entering his 10th season at the age of 32. He is in the final year of a three-year contract that he signed in 2016, scheduled to be a free agent in 2019. It is the second three-year pact he has signed with the Steelers, passing up previous opportunities to hit the open market. He is one of the most genuine and thoughtful people in the NFL.
