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: TE Pat Freiermuth
Stock Value: Down
Reasoning: The third-year tight end is dealing with some sort of undisclosed injury. Though he said that he will be ready to go during training camp, it limited him during OTAs and minicamp. It shouldn’t have a significant effect on his work building a rapport with Kenny Pickett, but any practice time lost due to injury is never a good thing.
First of all, let me make it clear that this is a very minor value evaluation. I’m not trying to paint Pat Freiermuth missing time during the spring as some kind of catastrophe that should have fans panicking about the season. But down is down, whether it’s down a little or down a lot.
And there’s no way to describe a player missing practice because he is too injured to practice as anything but a negative. It also doesn’t help that he ended the 2022 season with an injury. It is not known whether or not this current issue is tied to that in any way.
“He’s frustrated because he has something that’s kind of slowed him down from having a good camp”, Brian Batko of the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette quoted tight end coach Alfredo Roberts as saying about Freiermuth last week. “He was having a really good camp. He’s missed in the red zone, for sure”.
Batko described the injury only as undisclosed, but that may very well be because he was not given permission to disclose such information. There had been some informal indication that he may be dealing with a right foot injury.
Big things are expected of the third-year pro, particularly with respect to his budding relationship with quarterback Kenny Pickett. The two should form a very solid connection on the field this year, especially in clutch situations. But you need that time on the field together to establish the chemistry that leads to those in-game connections when you know what the other is doing.
But he said himself that he should be ready to go for training camp. Right now he’s obviously not missing much. This time is used primarily to rest, though players must also keep themselves in shape. Training camp is really where most of this growth happens, so as long as he is healthy at that point, this will be quickly forgotten about.
For what it’s worth, he also talked about his intentions of participating in Tight End University this year, but that doesn’t necessarily mean he will be doing a lot of physical activity there.
