Mueller: 53-man roster underscores Steelers' failure to rebuild offensive line

The dust has settled after the chaos that always accompanies roster cut-downs in the NFL, and the Steelers’ 53-man group is set.

So…are they going to do something about this offensive line?

Don’t tell me that Jesse Davis is the answer. Davis, who played for Brian Flores with the Dolphins, came over from the Vikings in a trade that cost the Steelers a conditional 2025 7^th-round pick. He’s almost 31 years old, has plenty of mileage on his tires, and looks like an insurance policy, and not a particularly reassuring one at that.

The fact that the Steelers don’t have any readily apparent fixes for their line woes isn’t what gets me. I’ve already seen enough to prepare myself for what’s to come, to get comfortable with being resigned to their fate.

No, what makes me mad is the very idea that things have gotten to this point at all. For a team that has a reputation as being very well-run, very steady, and rarely taken by surprise, Pittsburgh sure has butchered a very important position group.

In a perfect world, teams with rookie quarterbacks have built up their rosters around said quarterbacks, and the only question is whether or not their rookie passer will end up delivering the goods.

The Steelers have Kenny Pickett, but they’ve mismanaged their line so badly that a very real concern for many fans is whether or not Pickett will get maimed once he gets his chance.

Some of the forces that created the current situation were unpredictable, like David DeCastro’s inability to fully return from an ankle injury, but the writing was more on the wall for guys like Maurkice Pouncey, Ramon Foster and Alejandro Villanueva.

It might have been obvious to those who know a thing or two about football that aging linemen, no matter what their pedigree, can see their performance fall off a cliff, and that having several linemen aging out at once is a recipe for catastrophe, but the Steelers showed no urgency whatsoever with their handling of the situation.

In 2018, the team used a third-round pick to draft Chukwuma Okorafor. So far, he’s been a disappointment, with the team far bigger fans of his work than anyone else. The 2019 draft featured one pick used on a lineman – a seventh-rounder on Derwin Gray. What did 2020 bring? A fourth-round choice on Kevin Dotson. You’re already aware of 2021’s choices, Dan Moore and Kendrick Green, because neither one of them looks like an NFL player. Green never has and more has backslid badly.

If you’re scoring at home, that’s a total of five linemen drafted in the last five seasons, including this year, when the team didn’t take one, and none selected earlier than Green, who went 87^th overall.

The Steelers used less-than-premium draft capital to retool their line, and they’re getting bargain-basement results. Everyone loves Najee Harris’ talent, and Pat Freiermuth’s potential, but the team could have picked Creed Humphrey in 2021 (he went after both of them), and found their center for the next decade.

(I should note, as an aside, that Humphrey may not have flourished here. You might have noticed that since Mike Munchak left, the Steelers have employed some awful offensive line coaches, yet another way that they’ve neglected that group.)

Time and again in recent drafts, they prioritized rebuilding their skill groups post-Antonio Brown and Le’Veon Bell, in the interest of giving Ben Roethlisberger one last shot at playoff glory, even ignoring modern NFL wisdom and using a first-round pick on a running back in the process. They’d have done better by him in the short term and themselves in the long term if they had tried to rebuild the line on the fly.

What makes this even worse is that the team has had a knack for finding receivers in the later rounds, and talented running backs can be found just about anywhere in the draft, or even after the draft. Jaylen Warren, an undrafted free agent, certainly looks capable of contributing if needed.

The end result of all this roster-building malpractice is that the team needs several small miracles in order to be watchable on offense this year, and not get all of their quarterbacks ground to dust. And make no mistake, if Kenny Pickett is as good as advertised, the clock is ticking on the team’s window to win while he’s on his rookie deal.

In the longer term, the whole line will need an overhaul, and fast. The biggest question with that process isn’t whether or not the Steelers will make the right moves – as noted above, their recent track record is poor – but whether as an organization, they truly understand the need to make them at all.

This article originally appeared on Beaver County Times: Mueller: 53-man roster underscores Steelers' failure to rebuild offensive line