If you were in attendance during the first day of training camp practices for the Pittsburgh Steelers on Thursday, you may have been disappointed to have gotten no more than a scant few glimpses of All-Pro safety Minkah Fitzpatrick. It was much the same on Friday.
No, he wasn’t hurt or anything. He was just getting a good look at the options for his new strong safety, with Damontae Kazee and Keanu Neal running with the first-team offense. Either one or some combination of the two of them will be filling the shoes of Terrell Edmunds, whom Fitzpatrick has spent most of his career lining up with.
Now in Year Six and coming off of arguably his strongest season, there isn’t much that head coach Mike Tomlin needs to see from his star defensive back, which is precisely why he was a spectator on the first day of practices.
Asked about Fitzpatrick patrolling the sidelines rather than participating in practice and why that was, Tomlin said after Thursday’s practice that it was “Nothing of any significance. Sometimes we know a lot about guys. We minimize them in an effort to get to see others”.
Which is precisely what they should and need to do with Kazee and Neal, especially the latter, who was signed as an unrestricted free agent earlier this offseason, Kazee first joined the Steelers via the same route last year but missed half of the season due to a broken arm.
Building up a relationship between starting safeties is a lengthy process. That’s not to say that they can’t play well together right away. But there are things that you pick up about your partner over the years, including critical non-verbal communication and instinctual familiarity, the ability to predict what the other is going to do and where he is going to be.
Fitzpatrick had that with Edmunds, the two first pairing up in Week Three of the 2019 season after the Steelers acquired the former via trade, 18 games into his NFL career. Both were drafted in the first round the previous season and both started as rookies. They grew in the NFL together over the past four years.
According to general manager Omar Khan, the Steelers did attempt to re-sign Edmunds this offseason, but he opted for a contract with the Philadelphia Eagles, a fairly modest one-year deal that, when first announced, surprised many Steelers fans as to why Pittsburgh didn’t re-sign him.
By the time he signed on for the bad part of Pennsylvania, the Steelers had already re-signed Kazee on a two-year, $6 million contract and added Neal on a two-year deal worth $4.25 million. And yet we find ourselves talking about them as potentially platooning to do the same job Edmunds did.
Time will tell to see exactly how that pans out. For now, Fitzpatrick is watching and waiting with the rest of us—though he actually understands what he’s seeing and has the opportunity to convey that to his fellow safeties. How much influence will he have in determining who lines up next to him most often? I imagine it will not be insignificant.
