Now that the Pittsburgh Steelers’ 2022 season is over, the team finishing above .500 but failing to make the postseason, we turn our attention to the offseason and everything that means. One thing that it means is that some stock evaluations are going to start taking on broader contexts, reflecting on a player’s development, either positively or negatively, over the course of the season. Other evaluations will reflect only one immediate event or trend. The nature of the evaluation, whether short-term or long-term, will be noted in the reasoning section below.
Player: T Broderick Jones
Stock Value: Up
Reasoning: According to reports at OTAs, the rookie first-round draft pick has already seen some time working with the first-team offense, and the Steelers have gotten a head start at giving incumbent left tackle Dan Moore Jr. some work on the right side—signs pointing to where the team believes things are heading.
There is still a long way to go before any jobs are won or lost, but it’s not a bad sign for rookie left tackle Broderick Jones to be seeing some snaps with the first-team offense by the end of his second week of voluntary OTA sessions.
It’s also no small thing that the Steelers have already begun to give incumbent left tackle Dan Moore Jr. some work at right tackle. Moore has started every game in which he has played since being drafted in 2021, all of that at left tackle. The fact that they are giving him the jumpstart now shows they realize he’s going to have to learn to play on the right side, one way or another, and they want to give him as much time as possible to prepare.
That doesn’t guarantee that Broderick Jones is going to begin the regular season at left tackle as the starter on opening week. Indeed, there seems to be a small but growing crowd of individuals trying to downplay that possibility.
One thing that has to be acknowledged is that Jones has limited experience. He’s going to see growing pains. He’s going to start, sooner or later, which means Moore is going to have to find somewhere else to play. But we don’t know if that is going to be on the first snap of the year.
In truth, we probably shouldn’t read much into a rookie taking some first-team reps in OTAs, especially for linemen. It’s hard to say much about them without pads on, for one thing. But it can’t be taken as a bad sign at the very least that they wanted to see him working with the ones at this point.
