Now that training camp is over with the Pittsburgh Steelers back in Pittsburgh and gearing up for what they hope will be a much more productive season, it’s time to take stock of where the team stands. Specifically, where Steelers players stand individually based on what we have seen and are seeing over the course of training camp and the preseason and the regular season as it plays out. A stock evaluation can take a couple of different approaches and I’ll try to make clear my reasoning for each one. In some cases, it will be based on more long-term trends. In other instances, it will be a direct response to something that just happened. Because of this, we can and will see a player more than once over the course of the season as we move forward.
Player: G Kevin Dotson
Stock Value: Down
Reasoning: The third-year guard is coming off of one of the worst games of his relatively young starting career, which featured three penalties and a costly pressure that led to quarterback Kenny Pickett taking a hit from which he suffered a concussion. Not so bad of a game as to justify death threats, though.
Kevin Dotson knows that he played poorly. He said so after the game, or at least tried to, posting a tweet in which he apologized for his performance and vowed to get better. He ended up deleting it when fans started responding to it with death threats, after which point that became the story.
But that’s not this story. Yes, he got death threats, and yes, it’s wrong to send death threats to a player just because he didn’t play a good game. But he still didn’t play a good game, and that’s what matters, because he still has to play next week and thereafter.
While talking about the death threats to reporters the following day, he did make some comments that could be seen as defensive in which he justified his play a bit and suggested that outside of the penalties, it wasn’t that bad.
Perhaps it wasn’t that bad. But when you take into consideration the penalties as well, two of which were offensive holding calls, one of which left Kenny Pickett concussed, there is reason to be concerned. There is an argument to be made that he has been the team’s worst starting offensive lineman thus far this season.
Not that any of them have been great, though as a whole, things could have gone a lot worse, and during the preseason, it looked like it would have been. The offensive line has been somewhat of a pleasant surprise relative to what we saw during the offseason, but it’s still not where the offense needs it to be.
