You might not know it just by looking at the box score, but rookie second-round DL Keeanu Benton had an impressive game this week against the Las Vegas Raiders. He was a problem for C Andre James often when he was on the field, including on his first career sack.
He looked like a natural on that particular rep, giving you the feeling that while this might be his first time, it certainly won’t be his last. In fact, he already seems to be comfortable playing at the NFL level. While he’s not consistently dominating like he may have been used to at Wisconsin, he is more than holding his own and looking like he belongs.
“I’m getting more comfortable with it,”, he told reporters following Sunday’s win, during which his sack came, via Brian Batko of the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette. “I realize how [similar] it is to college. Just going out there and imposing your will on the other team”.
While the Steelers covet players who come out of the Wisconsin Badgers program—it produced current Steelers T.J. Watt, Isaiahh Loudermilk, and fellow rookie Nick Herbig—the most interesting thing about Benton’s college career is that of which it was not representative.
We saw him at the Senior Bowl, and we saw the pass-rush ability. His being able to go from the B gap to the A gap and win an edge and get across the face. We think that he has upside as a rusher”, assistant general manager Andy Weidl said of Benton. “If you need him to win as a rusher, he would. You saw snapshots of it, and we saw it at the Senior Bowl”.
Benton said that Wisconsin primarily asked him to be a run stuffer and he didn’t get as many opportunities to flash what he could do in the passing game. The Steelers are giving him that opportunity, and for some, he is already giving off hints of Stephon Tuitt or Javon Hargrave.
One would hope that he should have that talent level. After all, he was drafted in right around the same area, in fact just a couple slots behind where Tuitt was drafted nearly a decade earlier. And while he says that he feels comfortable already, this is still just the beginning for him.
In actuality, he might be a little stronger as a pass rusher right now than as a run defender, because he still has some discipline issues to tidy up. Fundamentally, he knows what to do, even if he doesn’t do it every time, but he has to be more of lane integrity, for example.
Those things will come with time. He’s already capable, as he said, of imposing his will on any given play. He has that physical ability, technical knowledge, and emotional intensity to do that. All you need is to scroll back up to the highlight of his sack above. There’s more where that came from.
