While his play was something less than spectacular, Pittsburgh Steelers rookie first-round OT Broderick Jones gained valuable experience on Friday night. A lot of experience, in fact. Nobody played a higher percentage of snaps than he did, logging 49 for the offense—12 more than anybody else on that side of the football.
He played the rest of the game outside of the opening drive when Dan Moore Jr. checked out of the game with the first of the first-team personnel. That was the plan, blocking for not just Mitch Trubisky but also Mason Rudolph and even Tanner Morgan.
“We wanted to see him do that”, offensive coordinator Matt Canada told reporters yesterday, via the team’s website. “He goes against some really good guys. We’ve got some really good guys on the edge here that he has to go against every day. We wanted to get somebody different, different moves”.
“Everybody’s got their own little rush tactic and those things, everybody’s run defense is different”, he added, “so we want to speed up that clock as fast as we can within the framework of not being silly. We wanted to give him a lot of reps. That was certainly an agenda”.
While he did not work with the first-team offense in the first preseason game, the players and coaches know it’s all but a matter of time. Canada’s remark that they are trying to “speed up that clock as fast as we can” is both significant and unsurprising.
While the team is not in a hurry to bump Moore down to a rotational role, you simply do not trade up into the top half of the first round for a guy you’re not making plans for. That’s what they did to get Jones, so the question is very much when rather than if—not that any regular readers need to be informed of that.
The coaches have generally offered praise for his first preseason showing, though it was also telling that their comments focused a lot on the idea of getting him exposure. That one fact is inarguable: he got a lot of exposure. But he also had some snaps he’d like to have back.
For his own part, assessing his play on Friday, he told reporters that he felt he played “pretty well”, according to Amanda Godsey, again noting that there were certain plays that he knows he could have done a better job on. Canada said that he felt Jones “did well”.
If he did well, then so did Moore in his brief playing time with the starters on the opening drive. It will be interesting to see how the playing time is distributed over the final two preseason games. Will Jones start one of the two games? I have a feeling that he will, but it won’t mean that he starts in the season opener.
