The Pittsburgh Steelers are now into the regular season, following the most unique offseason in the NFL since at least World War II. While it didn’t involve a player lockout, teams still did not have physical access to their players, though they were at least able to meet with them virtually.
Even training camp looked much different from the norm, and a big part of that was the fact that there will be no games along the way to prepare for. Their first football game of the year was to be the opener against the New York Giants.
As the season progresses, however, there will be a number of questions that arise on a daily basis, and we will do our best to try to raise attention to them as they come along, in an effort to both point them out and to create discussion
Questions like, how will the players who are in new positions this year going to perform? Will the rookies be able to contribute significantly? How will Ben Roethlisberger look—and the other quarterbacks as well? Now, we even have questions about whether or not players will be in quarantine.
These are the sorts of questions among many others that we have been exploring on a daily basis and will continue to do so. Football has become a year-round pastime and there is always a question to be asked, though there is rarely a concrete answer, as I’ve learned in my years of doing this.
Question: Will Kevin Dotson be making his first start on Sunday, and if so, how will he perform?
It certainly seems as though, even when the Steelers try to limit their rookies, circumstances find a way to get them on the field. Terrell Edmunds was supposed to be a sub-package player in 2019. Diontae Johnson, depth. Kevin Dotson? Well, he was to be on the bench all year
Except the Steelers don’t have the health in front of him to merit that. In fact, he has already played. With David DeCastro missing the season opener, Stefen Wisniewski started in his place. The veteran went down on the penultimate snap of the Steelers’ penultimate drive, leaving Dotson to step in and accumulate a small handful of snaps.
There has been a good deal of enthusiasm about the young man since he was drafted, and not just because he was already a Steelers fan, but the reality is that we know almost nothing about him as a professional, since we had no access to training camp this year, and there was no preseason to evaluate.
DeCastro and Wisniewski continue to be sidelined, and it’s certainly looking like they’re heading toward Dotson being in the starting lineup against the Denver Broncos on Sunday. Mike Tomlin and Randy Fichtner acknowledged that there is some angst about that possibility, but that would be the case for any rookie under these circumstances. Could this be the first of many starts in his career?
