Now that the Pittsburgh Steelers’ 2023 season is getting underway after the team finished above .500 but failing to make the postseason last year, we turn our attention to the next chapter of Steelers football and everything that entails. One thing that it means is that some stock evaluations are going to start taking on more specific contexts as we get into the season, reflecting more immediate plusses and minus rather than trends over long periods. The nature of the evaluation, whether short-term or long-term, will be noted in the reasoning section below.
Player: OL/FB(?) Kendrick Green
Stock Value: Up
Reasoning: The third-year offensive lineman has quickly morphed from whipping boy to fan favorite in conjunction with the team’s experimentations with him playing the fullback position over the course of the past two practices. At the very least, the expansion of his position versatility strengthens his case to retain a spot on the 53-man roster (triggering a chorus of groans from some).
On a roster that includes Kenny Pickett, George Pickens, T.J. Watt, Cameron Heyward, and Minkah Fitzpatrick, nobody has drawn bigger cheers over the past 48 hours than third-year offensive lineman Kendrick Green. Largely because he wasn’t playing along the offensive line.
No, instead, he was lining up in the backfield or in-line on a motion play. He was being used as a fullback, even catching two passes in his limited reps at the position—an experiment that head coach Mike Tomlin claimed yesterday began last season. He asked Green to emulate Patrick Ricard, the Baltimore Ravens’ rather sizeable fullback, who used to play defensive line snaps as well.
It’s not incredibly uncommon for teams to find an offensive or defensive lineman that they stick at fullback here and there, actually, so the Steelers doing so with Green would not in any way be an unprecedented move.
Indeed, we among others have been speculating about it as a possibility pretty much since he was drafted. His greatest attribute coming out of college, and the primary reason that they drafted him, was his athleticism for an interior offensive lineman, so that’s transferrable to fullback.
Given that they’ve only just begun this sort of tinkering, it’s hard to get a read on how seriously to take it, either in terms of its validity or in its extent. Could we ever see Green taking 10 to 15 snaps lining up in the backfield per game one day? Might it just be an occasional short-yardage package as a sort of tackle-eligible?
In order for that to even be a conversation, he does have to make the roster first. I admit I had to refresh my own memory, but I did not have him making the 53 in my own pre-training-camp prediction, opting for Kevin Dotson and rookie Spencer Anderson as the final two offensive line reserves.
But the door is certainly open for him. The preseason will be the critical factor. At the very least, I can say that he has made things more interesting.
