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: What will Chase Claypool offer as an encore performance after his big outing last week?
In terms of individual questions, I think this is probably the biggest one on the minds of Steelers fans right now. Chase Claypool has the football world’s attention after being named the Week 5 Offensive Player of the Week as a result of his big four-touchdown showing last week.
He did that as a rookie wide receiver in the fourth game of his career with six receptions and seven touches to his name. He did have one long touchdown—the longest in the NFL this season on a reception—and a couple of big plays overall, but he was still largely new and teams are learning about him as they began scouting him for the week.
That won’t be the case going forward. You don’t go unnoticed after you score four touchdowns in one game. That just doesn’t happen. And the Steelers are facing a division rival today, a Cleveland Browns team that will have been well aware of whom the Steelers drafted back in April and what that means for their offense.
It is notable that they will be without Greedy Williams, one of their starting cornerbacks, who has missed all year so far, with Terrance Mitchell replacing him, at least somewhat serviceably. Should he be matched up often on Mitchell rather than Denzel Ward, he could see a lot of targets heading in his direction once again after getting 11 of them last week.
