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: TE Darnell Washington
Stock Value: Up
Reasoning: The rookie tight end saw action on 25 snaps for the Steelers in the preseason opener, of which the majority were in run-blocking situations. He had his ups and downs in that area, speaking to his learning process as a rookie, but it was valuable experience as he prepares to play a sizeable role in meaningful games under one month from now.
Darnell Washington is big, tall, and strong. That’s how he played in the preseason opener but not always to great effect. There were times, for example, that his size worked against him, something that he is going to have to continually work on as he adjusts to the talent level in the NFL.
At 6-foot-7, Washington is going to struggle to be the low man in leverage situations. That’s going to crop up periodically in his blocking, and we did see that on multiple occasions during the Steelers’ preseason opener. We also saw him dominate at times, particularly in situations in which he was more able to rely upon his size.
There are ways to mitigate the limitations of your height as a blocker, and tight ends coach Alfredo Roberts seems to be working on that with him. It has to go beyond physicality and incorporate a little bit of physics.
That will come in time. He showed enough to demonstrate that he is the player he was scouted as during the pre-draft process. He wasn’t assumed to be a finished product, so there will be growing pains, but he will be able to contribute right away.
He did not get to show much as a receiver, unfortunately—the Steelers had the game in hand for much of his playing time, anyway, which is why most of his snaps were as a run blocker—but he did catch one pass.
Let’s hope that we get to see him work situationally as a receiver in the final two preseason games, particularly in the end zone. He’s been showing up almost daily in that area during the Steelers’ training camp practices, so it would be a relief to see him boxing out someone in a different jersey.
