Minkah Fitzpatrick hasn’t exactly played his best football in 2020. Here’s why Pittsburgh Steelers fans have a right to be worried.
Last year, Minkah Fitzpatrick was undoubtedly one of the best safeties in the National Football League. After struggling in his first two games with the Miami Dolphins in 2019, the former first-round draft choice was traded to the Pittsburgh Steelers prior to their Week three matchup against the 49ers.
The rest of his 2019 season couldn’t have been scripted any better. He completely turned his game around since leaving Miami and was now considered to be a top-three player in a Steelers uniform and one of the best young safeties in the league.
Minkah was a nightmare in the middle of the field for opposing offenses, as evidenced by his 8 takeaways last season. In addition, he was a threat once he got the ball in his hands – cashing in on two defensive scores last year.
Unfortunately, Fitzpatrick doesn’t look like the same player early in the 2020 season. Though we are only three games in, the first-team All-Pro safety from 2019 hasn’t done any of the things that helped him earn a reputation as one of the best up-and-coming defensive players in the league. In fact, we could go as far as to say that Minkah Fitzpatrick has been quite disappointing thus far in the early going.
While this is something that we’ve been accustomed to seeing from fellow safety, Terrell Edmunds, in the first few seasons of his career, we expected Minkah to continue to dominate the back end. Though, he’s still very young and obviously has loads of time to turn things around, here are four reasons why Steelers fans should be somewhat worried about Minkah Fitzpatrick moving forward: