Here We Go: Steelers @ Jaguars (Preseason Week 1) - Pregame Thoughts
We’ve made it my friends.
The Pittsburgh Steelers are traveling to Jacksonville today for a preseason game against the Jaguars tomorrow at 7 pm local time. As excited as I am to be gearing up for an actual Steelers football game, some of the more exciting (potential) storylines have already been removed from the equation due to injury, or coaches' decisions. Players that will not be suiting up include: Aaron Rodgers, T.J. Watt, Cam Heyward, Jalen Ramsey, Alex Highsmith, Nick Herbig, Isaac Seumalo, and more. I don’t need verification that those guys can do their jobs at this point in the process, and neither does the coaching staff, clearly.
Probably the most disappointing development as it pertains to THIS particular football game will be the absence of QB Will Howard who broke a finger on his throwing hand in practice earlier this week. I wrote up a summary of my expectations for Will Howard earlier this summer, and if you read that, you’d know that I am not super high on Will Howard as a prospect, anyway. With that being said, he’s a rookie quarterback that’s probably going to make our roster, and I was really looking forward to seeing him take some snaps at full speed. He’s now week-to-week with the hand injury, and it remains to be seen if we will see him at all this preseason.
Make no mistake about it, though, there’s a lot to set your clocks for about this game. It was so funny to me seeing Steelers twitter fall apart over the Will Howard injury, citing there’s nothing to watch this game for, like four other players weren’t selected BY US ahead of him. Derrick Harmon has been turning heads all camp long. Yinz ain’t excited for your first opportunity to see him in the black and gold? Kaleb Johnson is on my shortlist for offensive rookie of the year. Yinz ain’t ready to see him for the first time? Jack Sawyer? Yahya Black? This draft class has been impressive all summer long, and I really think all those guys are going to make an impact in 2025. Best believe I’ll be watching out for them.
After a couple rough weeks in Latrobe, Broderick Jones took a significant leap in practice this week, sparking some hope within me that he’s on an upward trajectory. This coming on the heels of the news that the Steelers brought in veteran help at OT in Andrus Peat…something I said needed to happen after Calvin Anderson got hurt in practice last week. I thought, briefly, that Jones' seat might start getting hot, but that seems to have cooled off for the time being. He can really ease the minds of a lot of sceptical fans, myself included, with a clean performance tomorrow evening. Mike Tomlin refused to speculate how much playing time the first-team offensive line will get.
One last thing that Steelers fans should be watching for tomorrow is, who separates themselves in this group of wide receivers? DK Metcalf (Coaches decision) and Calvin Austin III (injury, undisclosed) will both sit this one out, which means more opportunities for guys like Roc Taylor and Roman Wilson. Who knows, maybe Bobby Trees defibs his chances at a roster spot. Whatever the case, there’s several WRs that are probably fringe-53 kinda guys that really need to show out over the next few weeks. Tomorrow night against unicorn CB Travis Hunter will be their first real opportunity to do that. No pressure.
Jaguars are the favorites in this one, them being the home team and playing their starters while ours rest. There’s always a section of the fanbase that gets real down when we look bad in the preseason, but let’s not do that this weekend. Win/lose/draw…it doesn’t matter. I just wanna see our guys stay healthy and I wanna see our depth on display; especially on defense. Based on everything coming out of training camp, we may not need our 1s on defense to have a dominant performance against the Jags. Here. We. Go.
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