The Pittsburgh Steelers traded up in the 2023 NFL Draft from the 17th overall selection to the 14th to select OT Broderick Jones from the University of Georgia. He played almost exclusively at left tackle in Athens but was overall inexperienced with just 19 total starts in college. Now, one year into his NFL career, he added another 11 starts to his resume. He started one game at left tackle following an injury to Dan Moore Jr. in Week Five against the Baltimore Ravens and then took over the starting right tackle position in Week Nine for the rest of the season. With 30 combined starts between college and the NFL, 10 of those have come at right tackle. Should the Steelers only be open to right tackles in the draft due to Broderick Jones?
The most prominent argument on the side of flipping him back to LT is the career arc of former Steelers OG Kevin Dotson. He was a middling LG for the Steelers but moved back to the right side after getting traded to the Los Angeles Rams and had among the best performances at the position in the NFL last season. During the season, our Alex Kozora wrote an article on the possible parallels between Dotson and Jones and wondered if the Steelers were making the same mistake.
His Pro Football Focus grades back up that claim to a certain extent with his best overall grade coming in Week Five at left tackle. In that game he had a 74.8 overall grade, including a 67.0 pass-blocking grade and a 77.2 run-blocking grade. Those overall and run-blocking grades were his season-highs while he topped that pass-blocking grade two times at right tackle. He certainly finished the season with a rough showing as a pass blocker with three of his final five games below a 35.0 grade. Over those games, he was charged with allowing 18 total pressures and four sacks.
It is definitely possible that some of that is due to his inexperience on the right side, but it is important to remember that he was lacking overall experience coming out of college. Dotson, on the other hand, had a whopping 52 starts at Louisiana at right guard before being asked to flip to the left side.
Jones only got the one start at left tackle in 2023, but he did play significant snaps on the left side against the Houston Texans in Week Four after Moore got injured. He didn’t fare particularly well in that game with three pressures allowed and a 53.0 overall grade from PFF, so it is hard to draw any hard conclusions from the small sample size of his NFL starts.
After Jones was inserted at right tackle, the Steelers enjoyed a complete turnaround in their rushing success. Over the first eight weeks, the Steelers were averaging 79.7 rushing yards per game. Over the final 10 weeks, with Jones at right tackle, they rushed for 145.2 yards per game. That isn’t solely because of Jones, but he did provide a boost over Chukwuma Okorafor as a run blocker. It is not as if it was all negative in his 10 starts on the right side.
It is also important to consider the comments made by head coach Mike Tomlin when discussing Jones during his end-of-season press conference. Here are Tomlin’s words when asked if the Steelers wanted to move Jones back to the left side:
“Undecided as of yet,” Tomlin said via the Steelers’ YouTube page. “Obviously he has capabilities in that area, but he was more than capable at right tackle as well.”
From the words of Tomlin, it doesn’t sound like moving Jones back to the left side is a foregone conclusion.
Jones talked a little bit about making the switch to right tackle during the season and said it wasn’t “the worst thing,” but he did talk about the difficulties of unlearning things from the left side and flipping plays in his head.
The 2024 NFL Draft looks to have one of the strongest OT classes in recent memory with NFL Network’s Daniel Jeremiah having eight tackles among his top 50 prospects. If the right guy falls to the Steelers in the first or second round and he happens to be a left tackle prospect, I wouldn’t rule out the Steelers making that selection.
