The Pittsburgh Steelers have dressed and played every healthy rookie short of WR Roman Wilson, many of them starting. With injuries continuing to mount, though, is Week 5 finally the time for the third-round pick to debut? Perhaps not quite yet, suggests Pittsburgh Post-Gazette beat writer Ray Fittipaldo.
“He is out there looking better”, he said on 93.7 The Fan on Friday, discussing the rookie Wilson in practice. “But it seems to me”, he speculated, Arthur Smith “is really comfortable dressing four receivers and four tight ends”.
The Steelers are down a tight end again in MyCole Pruitt, but they have dressed Rodney Williams in his place. But the variable we are not accounting for is Cordarrelle Patterson. They dressed four wide receivers last week, but Mike Tomlin planned for Patterson as that fifth receiver. With him down this week, perhaps Wilson dresses.
A third-round pick out of Michigan, Roman Wilson suffered an ankle injury early in training camp. He turned some heads early, but he missed so much time that the Steelers didn’t feel comfortable playing him. During the first two games, they elevated veteran special teams WR Ben Skowronek from the practice squad.
But Skowronek suffered an injury and the Steelers placed him on the Reserve/Injured List. Even still, the Steelers did not dress Wilson last week, functioning with Patterson instead. But now Patterson is out with an ankle injury on top of that—so what are their options?
Fittipaldo notes that the Steelers generated over 300 passing yards with barely any contributions from wide receivers other than George Pickens. But is that what they actually want? I’m sure they would be glad for somebody else who can step up. So far, they have gotten one showing here and there. Yet they don’t seem confident Wilson can provide any more stability.
“That might have been a foreign concept with other coordinators”, Fittipaldo said of Smith’s willingness to dress only four receivers. “But with him, it’s okay. … He can get it done in other ways. I know there’s gonna be a time when Roman Wilson is ready. I just don’t sense that that time is this week”.
But when is that time going to be? The Steelers are in trade talks with the Las Vegas Raiders for Davante Adams. Now obviously Roman Wilson isn’t Adams, but all of these talks say something about their feelings about the wide receiver group as a whole.
