The Pittsburgh Steelers will begin the third day of training camp at Saint Vincent College with some guests on the field. Referees will be present to officiate the practice, per Alex Kozora on X. This will help the team get acclimated to playing clean, penalty-free football.
As Kozora noted in his tweet, this is a little early in the process to have the refs joining practice. Normally, they wait until the pads come on to start including them in the process, but the Steelers have changed up a bunch of things at training camp this year. That includes the new conditioning test they put the players through and earlier start times for practice. Tomlin said the team is “forever changing” to seek a better-finished product in the end.
Penalties weren’t a huge issue for the 2023 version of the Steelers. They averaged just 5.1 penalties per game, which was the sixth-lowest mark in the NFL. But there were some individual players who had issues, like then rookie CB Joey Porter Jr. with eight. Still, there are a lot of new faces on the team, and it is never too early to get started on drilling down the fundamentals.
The offensive line will be a unit to watch in particular this season. Three of the five projected starters are rookies or second-year players, and they will be blocking for a pair of quarterbacks, Russell Wilson and Justin Fields, who love to extend plays and roll out of the pocket to escape pressure. Sometimes, that can lead to extra holding calls as they are forced to change their blocking angles late in the snap.
This won’t be the last time the refs are present at practice, but it will be an additional aspect to track today with the performance of the players. Kozora, I’m sure, will have us covered with some of that penalty data later today in his daily training camp diary.
