Guess what, folks. It’s training camp time. And that means it’s time for training camp questions. For the first time since 2019, the Pittsburgh Steelers are actually back at Saint Vincent College in Latrobe after having been forced to remain in Pittsburgh, where they held their past two training camps inside of the Field Formerly Known as Heinz.
Even though the Steelers are back on very familiar ground, more specifically on that of Chuck Noll Field, this is a training camp that is unusually full of certainty. After all, they haven’t had a genuine quarterback battle in a couple of decades, but they have one now with Mitch Trubisky, Kenny Pickett, and Mason Rudolph.
We’ve got yet another new offensive line, with some incoming veterans in James Daniels and Mason Cole. Myles Jack is in at inside linebacker, replacing Joe Schobert, and we’ll have to see if Devin Bush can return to form after last year’s dismal display.
There’s still so much going on, and training camp will only create more questions as we go along, even as it starts to provide some answers. We’ll be covering them here on a daily basis for the community to “talk amongst yourselves”, as Linda Richman might say on Coffee Talk.
Question: How equally will the Steelers split guard reps between Kevin Dotson and Kendrick Green?
Anything that starts out with the phrase “based on the first day of training camp” needs to be taken with a healthy dose of salt, and I hope I don’t even need to say that. Reading too much into what you see the first time a team is on the field is a fool’s errand for most things.
But there are some observations you can make, and we do have plenty of salt—kosher, iodized, Himalayan, you name it. So let’s talk about the left guard position. The incumbent is Kevin Dotson, a third-year former fourth-round pick who has 13 career starts, including nine at left guard last year.
The challenger is a second-year former third-round draft pick, Kendrick Green, who started the majority of the season at center up until the point at which he sustained an injury, which knocked him out of the starting lineup.
There are two observations worth noting here. For one thing, Green didn’t work with the centers at all, which would seem to be an indication that he is being asked to be all-in on the battle for the job at left guard. The second thing worth noting is that the team did rotate him in somewhat liberally with the first-team offense, while not much else changed.
The Steelers obviously like Green, or they wouldn’t have drafted him in the third round, but they know he was never comfortable at center. It would be entirely reasonable if they were to hope that he can reach the potential they thought he had when they drafted him by moving him to guard.
And measuring how many snaps he actually gets with the starters would seem to be as good a preliminary indicator as any about where the competition stands. Obviously, he has to play well, but he also has to play. Presumably, the one follows the other. So it should definitely be worth monitoring how the first-team snaps are distributed at left guard henceforth.
