The city of Latrobe in western Pennsylvania is gearing up for what is perhaps its busiest season of the year, the few weeks when the Pittsburgh Steelers are in the neighborhood conducting their training camp schedule at Saint Vincent College.
There is a lot of optimism surrounding the team this year and plenty of reasons to be excited for training camp. Multiple rookie draft picks figure to be in hotly contested position battles for key starting jobs. Perhaps none is more consequential than first-round pick Broderick Jones’ attempt to unseat Dan Moore Jr. as the left tackle.
Yet it’s no sure thing that he will win the job right away, even if his eventual ascension is rightly regarded as inevitable—including by Moore. That has as much to do as anything with the current state of his game as a relatively inexperienced player coming out of college.
“I think Jones has immense, immense upside, that he can be one of the best left tackles in this league two years from now, three years from now”, NFL analyst Matt Williamson recently said on the Irish Steelers Podcast. “But I don’t want people to get discouraged if he isn’t, because he still has a lot of work to do technique-wise”.
“You’ll see a lot of his pass sets, he drops his head for a split second. There’s no reason to do that and you lose sight of things. His handwork still needs some work”, he continued. “But if he doesn’t win the starting job immediately, I’m sure everybody’s gonna lose their mind. ‘He’s a bust. He can’t play’”.
One of the issues that he rightly pointed out is simply the nature of the offensive line. Outside of quarterback, there is no other position where you expect universally for those players to be on the field for every single snap for their unit. Granted, most starting defensive backs almost never leave the field, either, but there is more wiggle room for rotational considerations there.
The point is, Jones has to show he can handle anything that’s thrown at him before they can put him into the starting lineup. They can’t just put him on the field for the run-blocking snaps—after all, that would completely telegraph what they’re doing.
If indeed his performance in training camp and the preseason concludes he isn’t quite ready to enter the starting lineup, however, it should prove well worth the wait once he does. And in the meantime, you could expect to see him employed, perhaps quite liberally, as a tackle-eligible tight end as he gets his feet wet and plays to his strengths as a run blocker.
