How many starting offensive linemen do the Steelers still need?

The Pittsburgh Steelers have a young offensive line, but that doesn’t mean they will all turn out to be good. How many starters do they still need on the OL? 

I was more than just a little concerned when the Steelers elected to forego drafting an offensive lineman with either of their first two picks in the 2021 NFL Draft. This was after the team had already neglected the position in free agency.

While many fans naively believe Pittsburgh would be better off with their younger group this year, I assumed that losing David DeCastro, Maurkice Pouncey, Alejandro Villanueva, and Matt Feiler in the same offseason was going to have dire consequences. Sadly, this proved to be the case.

With just one returning starter from last season, Pittsburgh’s offensive line was in shambles for most of the 2021 season. Just when we think they are starting to mesh, they fall apart the very next week.

It’s clear that Mike Tomlin’s team needs more help in this department. But how much more? How many of the players do they currently have should be considered long-term answers at their positions?

Steelers still need three staters on the OL, by my count

Just because this team has five starters on the offensive line by default doesn’t mean that the Steelers have five offensive linemen who are the long-term solutions to the problem along the OL. In fact, by my assessment, Pittsburgh has just two players I think they can count on in the future: OG Kevin Dotson and OT Dan Moore.

Dotson and Moore are far from finished products, but we have seen the flashes early in their NFL careers. While there’s no guarantee that these two players will turn out to be anything more than serviceable staters, I think they are the only two the team should be trying to build around at this point in time.

Unforatntly, everyone else needs to be viewed as expendable until proven otherwise. This goes for center Kendrick Green as well, who proved that the NFL stage was much too big for him this season. Again, this isn’t to say that Green can’t swiftly turn his play around in 2022, but unless he makes drastic improvements, this is a position that we are probably always going to want to upgrade until we find a long-term solution.

Likewise, we knew offensive guard Trai Turner was going to be nothing more than a stop-gap player, while Chukwuma Okorafor hasn’t shown nearly enough progress in his first four seasons. Both players are free agents in 2022, and there just isn’t enough incentive to bring them back to the team on anything more than veteran minimum deals (which they could both likely exceed elsewhere).

Honestly, after the trainwreck we witnessed this year, I’d be glad if the Steelers already had two of their future starters in place in Dan Moore and Kevin Dotson, and I’m hoping they will only continue to improve. The bad news is that this team is still at least three quality starters short on the offensive line, and they will need to start making bigger draft and free-agent investments if they truly want to fix this.