Injuries might be part of the game, but you sure don’t want them to be a part of the last preseason game. Which is why the highlight of this finale on Thursday night in Carolina came at 9:36 p.m., when television cameras showed No. 1 pick Derrick Harmon sitting on the bench between Cam Heyward and T.J. Watt wearing street clothes and a huge smile.
You see, earlier in the broadcast there had been another shot of Harmon. In that one, he was in uniform, sitting on a cart and about to be taken from the field after sustaining an apparent knee injury, with a towel draped over his head hiding the anguish that seemed certain to be etched on his face. In his postgame presser, Coach Mike Tomlin said Harmon had suffered a knee sprain, the severity of which was to be evaluated.
An update on Harmon’s injury is likely to come in the next few days, but interpreting Tomlin’s choice of words plus the before and after images from the field points to a huge sigh of relief being in order.
As for the game itself, it will be recorded as a 19-10 victory for the Steelers over the Panthers, and that outcome gave them a 2-1 preseason record one summer removed from an 0-3. What any of that means, or if it means anything at all, can be debated but it really doesn’t deserve to be. That’s because the real value in the preseason finale is how it contributes to the evaluation process. And when that process is completed, there will be roster spots won, and each one of those roster spots represents a job that would come with a weekly paycheck of between $47,000-$70,000. That’s really what was going on inside Bank of America Stadium.
“It is the last opportunity for people to state a case for themselves, and I don’t want to understate that,” said Coach Mike Tomlin the day before the team left for Charlotte. “There’s real opportunity there … Now this opportunity isn’t the end-all, be-all, but you do have an opportunity to put an exclamation point on your work.”
There were some exclamation points put on some work.
Quarterback is the NFL’s glamor position, and the attention paid even to the quarterbacks on the lower rungs of the depth chart can reach a fever pitch. These Steelers had a competition for the No. 3 quarterback spot this summer, and to put that into perspective, not every team even keeps 3 quarterbacks on their 53-man rosters.
Will Howard vs. Skylar Thompson wasn’t supposed to be anything except a formality. Howard was a draft pick who had played great for Ohio State during a run through the College Football Playoff that ended with a National Championship for the Buckeyes. Thompson was the guy the Steelers were able to sign to a futures contract at the end of last season because the Miami Dolphins – the team that drafted him in 2022 – didn’t want him anymore.
But 2 events that happened almost simultaneously combined to flip the dynamic. Howard breaking a bone in his right pinkie finger during a training camp practice at Saint Vincent College was the first, and the start of the preseason games following shortly after was the second. Because Aaron Rodgers wasn’t suiting up for preseason games, and the Steelers knew what they had in Mason Rudolph as the veteran backup and planned on playing him appropriately sparingly, Thompson was going to take a lot of snaps during the preseason.
Which he did, and with those snaps Thompson completed 41-of-56 (73.2 percent) for 498 yards, with 4 touchdowns, 1 interception, and a rating of 116.5. Howard was left to sit around and watch.
Against the Panthers, Thompson completed 11-of-13, and his 152 yards passing accounted for 47 percent of the Steelers’ 325 total net yards, and the offense produced 1 touchdown and 2 field goals in the three series that he quarterbacked. My prediction for 4 p.m. on Tuesday, Aug. 26 is that by then the Steelers have figured out a way to keep Thompson while also retaining Howard. And those machinations wouldn’t have been necessary but for Thompson’s exclamation point.
Scotty Miller is another who threw up an exclamation point. A 5-foot-9, 180-pound receiver who had to fight for a roster spot in the summer before each of his 6 previous NFL seasons, had to do it again this summer. Miller caught 9 passes for 167 yards this preseason – 3 for 82 yards vs. Carolina – and just as significant was the rapport he seemingly was developing with Rodgers during those daily practices at Saint Vincent College.
Add Yayha Black to the exclamation point category, too. Not that he needed anything special to hold onto the roster spot he had earned over the entirety of the offseason, but Black’s 5 tackles and 2 sacks against the Panthers should ease any concern that might have existed in giving a rookie fifth-round draft pick a spot in the defensive line rotation for the regular season opener on Sept. 7.
While not necessarily exclamation point worthy, the running game improved over the course of the preseason, which reflects on the individual improvements made by RBs Kaleb Johnson, Trey Sermon and Lew Nichols. And because the pass protection was reliable throughout the summer, the offensive line as a unit never presented itself as a liability.
But not everything was an exclamation point on Thursday night. In fact, there were a few #$@&% – starting with 13 penalties for 104 yards, and the Panthers converting 9-of-16 (56.3 percent) on third downs, and owning a 9-minute, 56-second edge in time of possession even though they started the game with their No. 3 quarterback and ended the game with their No. 4 quarterback.
The work in getting from 90 to 53 began in earnest on the flight home from Charlotte, with 4 p.m. on Tuesday the hard deadline.
It’s not going to be easy. “You know, there’s always some difficult decisions and conversations, and really, I’ve learned not to speculate until you get out of this stadium,” said Tomlin. “There are injuries and things that could happen that could change the course of those discussions.”
And who knows what it might entail.
“You never say never,” said Tomlin about the possibility of adding players from the outside.”
And, “I just think that we all have gotten pretty comfortable with getting people on a moving train, if you will,” was his response when asked whether the proximity of the regular season opener might be a deterrent in considering those kinds of moves.
Their preseason is over. The cut-down deadline is in 5 days, and the regular season opener is 12 days after that. The Steelers have some work to do, some of it the result of exclamation points, and some of it because they need to try to bend some of their questions marks into more exclamation points.
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