It seemed that for many years the most popular media narrative was that the Pittsburgh Steelers were getting old. Every year was the year they were finally going to be too old. Of course, eventually they were, but by and large they’ve turned the roster over since then, and when you take a look at their core, in many places it’s quite the opposite. But for NFL analyst Brian Baldinger, that isn’t an issue for this team.
“When you’re around this team, they’re very youthful”, he said on his In the Huddle podcast with Carl Dukes and Jason La Canfora. “You just start looking at the key guys on this roster and you go, ‘Man, they’re young’, but they’ve got the right coach. They have the right culture. You could see these kids growing up very quickly around Cam Heyward and around T.J. [Watt], around some real veteran guys that are there and established”.
It has to start with the quarterback position, where Kenny Pickett is only going into his second season. Granted, he’s ‘old’ for his status, 25 years old. But then you have the 22-year-old George Pickens, the 24-year-old Pat Freiermuth, the 25-year-old Najee Harris, the 21-year-old Broderick Jones, the 25-year-old Alex Highsmith. Between offense and defense, only three players 30 years or older are projected to start, and that includes 30-year-old Damontae Kazee. Cameron Heyward and Patrick Peterson are the others.
Others are still breaking in, namely the rookie class. There’s the aforementioned Jones, but also Joey Porter Jr. Keeanu Benton, Nick Herbig, Darnell Washington. Not to mention last year’s class. So many key players are still in the early portions of their career.
But Baldinger trusts that they are in the right environment in Pittsburgh where their youth and relative inexperience are not a handicap. The Steelers have a generational culture rooted in history as it is, but Tomlin does a great job of nurturing it and keeping it going.
He’s not new to this, after all, and his command of practices plays a big role in keeping everybody engaged and focused on the task at hand. Baldinger, who was at OTAs, observed the seasoned head coach “taking every moment possible to teach, to learn a situation here that might come up in a game”.
“As a fan, as an analyst, as a guy that loves the game, I couldn’t get enough”, he said. “I simply couldn’t get enough watching it”.
The Steelers will be leaning heavily on some of their youngest stars to be the driver of this team, particularly on offense, with Pickett, Pickens, Harris, and Freiermuth, and now Jones, representing a core that they will likely want to try to keep together for as long as they possibly can. But it may get rather expensive. That would be a wonderful problem to have.
