Throughout his career with the Pittsburgh Steelers, guard Kevin Dotson has been up and down.
Entering the 2023 season, Dotson finds himself as a depth option after the Steelers signed veteran guards Isaac Seumalo and Nate Herbig in free agency, pushing Dotson to the bubble on the 53-man roster.
Despite some of the disappointments over the last two seasons from Dotson, he will always have his rookie season with his childhood favorite team.
That season in 2020, after joining the Steelers as a fourth-round pick in the 2020 NFL Draft, Dotson played in 13 games, starting four games in total as a rookie, playing 358 total snaps.
While that is a limited sample size overall, it was a strong sample size for Dotson. According to Pro Football Focus’ offensive lineman signature stats dating back to 2006, Dotson has the best pressure rate allowed in a single season at just 0.50 percent, which occurred in that 2020 season.
“Dotson set the mark for the best pressure rate by a guard, breaking Kraig Urbik’s 2011 record (0.7 percent). Including both Dotson and Urbik, just three guards have ever managed a sub-1 percent pressure rate — the other being Brian Waters in 2006,” PFF’s Mason Cameron writes.
Pretty ironic that he finds himself in the same company as former failed Steelers draft pick Kraig Urbik, whom the Steelers selected in the third round of the 2009 NFL Draft. Urbik was inactive his entire rookie season and claimed off waivers the following season after final roster cuts by the Buffalo Bills.
Two years later, Urbik had a career year.
Then, Dotson went and set the record nine years later with the lowest pressure rate allowed by any guard in NFL history, dating back to the PFF data in 2006.
During the 2020 season, Dotson turned in a sparkling 87.2 pass blocking grade, allowing just one total pressure in 219 pass blocking snaps, per PFF. That’s seemingly unheard of.
Since then though, it’s been a bit downhill for Dotson. He’s still been rather solid in pass protection, but he’s allowed seven total sacks the last two seasons and 26 total pressures in 1,040 pass blocking snaps combined in 2021 and 2022.
It’s an impressive record to hold, and for a team that is pass happy maybe he makes a ton of sense as a training camp trade from the Steelers. He’s essentially third on the depth chart at guard behind the two starters in Seumalo and James Daniels, and then behind the swing backup in Herbig.
Regardless of what happens in his career moving forward, he’ll always have that rookie season showing though, which had expectations high for the fourth-round pick out of Louisiana. He hasn’t met those expectations yet, but there’s a good pass blocker in there.
