The remaining 70 players on the Pittsburgh Steelers’ 90-man roster will know by the end of the day—around 4 PM, specifically—whether they have a job or not. That is the deadline for teams to submit their roster cuts to whittle their way down to a 53-man roster.
If they don’t get called up to the coaches’ offices and get asked to bring their playbook along, they will be safe, at least temporarily, barring further transactions. One player many are wondering about right now is third-year OL Kendrick Green, especially following the trade of G Kevin Dotson.
A former starter as a rookie in 2021, Green was demoted to gameday inactive last year. This offseason, he has been simply competing for a roster spot. Nominally, he has been in the mix for the backup center role, spending almost all of the offseason there, but he started the preseason finale at right guard.
“I ain’t really worried about it”, he told Gerry Dulac of the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette when asked for his thoughts about the fate of his tenure in Pittsburgh. “It is what it is. Whatever happens, happens”.
In a vacuum, that’s a healthy mindset. Control the controllables, as head coach Mike Tomlin would say. Green has no control over his positioning for a roster spot anymore. There is nothing he can do to better his odds, so, as he said, whatever happens, happens.
A third-round pick in 2021 out of Illinois, Green was thrust into the starting lineup right away, playing the center position even though he only had a few starts there during his college career. Formerly a defensive lineman, his college experience came almost exclusively at guard, and he was open about the difficulties he had adjusting to center.
The Steelers threw him back out to guard in 2022 after signing Mason Cole as a veteran starter at center, in fact pitting him against Dotson to start there. He lost handily, and sat on the bench behind J.C. Hassenauer and Jesse Davis, the latter a veteran pickup just before the start of the regular season.
This offseason, as noted, he was back at center after the Steelers signed two guards in free agency, but opting not to re-sign Hassenauer, who was their backup center. Green spent a good deal of the spring working with the second-team unit at center, but there are no guarantees that he makes the 53-man roster.
Especially not after struggling in the first two preseason games, particularly the opener. Even Green recognizes that, though he said that he believes he “played pretty solid” in the finale against the Atlanta Falcons while playing guard.
That certainly was his best game of the three, yet even that was not particularly good, as his inability to hold anchor in the trenches was on display multiple times in the early portions of the game, even while playing against Atlanta’s second-string line.
With that being said, the Steelers’ alternatives to Green are not robust. Presumably the frontrunner would be seventh-round rookie Spencer Anderson, who has spent time playing all five line positions this summer. Dylan Cook is another player who could sneak onto the roster, though he has no center experience and limited guard exposure.
