The 2023 offseason has brought with it about as much change as we have seen to a Pittsburgh Steelers roster in many a year. That by and large seems to be a reflection of the new management up in the front office, with a lot of old faces gone and new ones replacing them.
That may be as true of the secondary as it is anywhere. Three of the Steelers’ starting five members of the secondary are gone, most notably cornerback Cameron Sutton, but also, significantly, Terrell Edmunds, the team’s starting strong safety for the past five seasons. While they still have All-Pro Minkah Fitzpatrick. They’re figuring out what the back end will look like, with the retention of Damontae Kazee and the addition of Keanu Neal.
“It’s not too much different”, he admitted during OTAs about what the back end is looking like with Edmunds no longer here, via the team’s website. “We got a nice rotation, kind of like we did last year with myself, Terrell, and Kazee. But now it’s Keanu, instead of Terrell. We’re still figuring out what it looks like. It’s gonna be a little bit different, probably, but it’s not too much different”.
Now, I don’t know that I would describe what the Steelers had last year as a ‘rotation’, per say—actually, I wouldn’t, at all. Fitzpatrick and Edmunds were the starting safeties and were on the field for nearly every snap for which they were healthy.
But the defense did like to use Kazee as a third safety a lot when he returned from a broken forearm in the second half of the season. He was not rotating with Fitzpatrick or Edmunds, but he was rotating into the mix. Perhaps that is what he was referring to, but it’s somewhat hard to gauge exactly what he was answering.
The question that he was asked is what it was like working with Kazee “in this role”, which I took to be an implication that Kazee was working in the starting lineup. Perhaps Fitzpatrick chose to dodge that allusion as a means of avoiding acknowledging any kind of plan about the starting lineup and instead focusing on the rotational aspect.
At least as far as we know, the Steelers don’t have a hard and fast plan for who will be the strong safety this year between Kazee and Neal, though both have extensive experience working in that role. Most have assumed that it would be Kazee, who is going into his second season with the Steelers, but we don’t know that for certain.
It’s possible the team will actually use some kind of rotation this year, favoring Kazee in certain situations and Neal in others, with the latter perceived as more of a box defender and the former geared more toward playing in coverage. That would be rather different from last year, and really, different from what teams generally want to do. But we won’t know what it all looks like until we get into the regular season.
