The Pittsburgh Steelers’ 2021 season is over, already eliminated from the postseason after suffering a 42-21 loss at the hands of Patrick Mahomes and the Kansas City Chiefs. They just barely made the postseason with a 9-7-1 record and a little help from their friends.
This is an offseason of major change, with the retirement of Ben Roethlisberger, the possible retirement of general manager Kevin Colbert, and the decisions about the futures of many important players to be made, such as Joe Haden, Stephon Tuitt, JuJu Smith-Schuster, and others—some already decided, some not.
Aside from exploring their options at the quarterback position, the top global priority, once again, figures to be addressing the offensive line, which they did not do quite adequately enough a year ago. Dan Moore Jr. looks like he may have a future as a full-time starter, but Kendrick Green was clearly not ready. Chukwuma Okorafor was re-signed, but Trai Turner was not. James Daniels and Mason Cole were added in free agency.
These are the sorts of topics 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. There is rarely a concrete answer, but this is your venue for exploring the topics we present through all their uncertainty.
Question: What’s your biggest takeaway (or takeaways) from spring drills—OTAs and minicamp?
It seems to have come in gone rather quickly—thanks in no small part to the decision of head coach Mike Tomlin to skip a week of OTAs—but the Steelers’ spring drills have already come and gone, and the roster is off for the next several weeks.
When they return, for the first time in years, they will not be coming back to the UPMC Rooney Sports Complex, but will be back in Latrobe, PA, where St. Vincent College will host the Steelers’ training camp, as they have done for decades upon decades prior to the 2020 COVID-19 pandemic forced a disruption.
The return to St. Vincent will mark a new era. Ben Roethlisberger is gone. Kevin Colbert is gone. Keith Butler is gone after nearly two decades with the team. Unfortunately, Stephon Tuitt, too, is also now gone, having recently made public his decision to retire.
There’s still a lot for this roster to show us, but given where we are now, the question is valid—what is your biggest takeaway from what we have seen and heard of the 2022 edition of the Pittsburgh Steelers through OTAs and minicamp?
Surely, there can be more than one, but I would imagine that the majority of the answers will be populated by discussions of either the quarterback position and Mitch Trubisky working as the starter, or of the state of the offense itself.
