LATROBE, Pa. — Mitch Trubisky came up behind me, and I honestly hadn’t even noticed him come up the hill to the foot of the St. Vincent student center, where the Steelers’ makeshift locker room is set up. When I turned and saw him, he had his hat pulled low, a backpack pulled over both shoulders, and he blended in with a handful of other players in a small space around him.
This is different for the No. 2 pick in the 2017 draft.
His arrival in Pittsburgh is in no way how he landed in Chicago five summers ago. This time around, he was signed early in free agency, and his new team backstopped his acquisition by drafting a quarterback in the first round. And that reflects the difference in expectations too. Few outside this place are predicting Trubisky will finally harness the talent that made him a high-first-round pick in the first place.
Thus, he could make his way up that incline after a brisk walkthrough without any fanfare.
He’s O.K. with that, too, in case you’re wondering.
“I always put a lot on myself, just because of what I expect out of myself,” Trubisky told me a few minutes later. “But it’s just a totally different situation being the No. 2 overall pick. I was a lot younger at the time. Now I have a lot more experience, a lot more perspective.”
So it’s different for him, and for the Steelers, too, with the team returning to camp about an hour east of their headquarters, in the foothills of the Allegheny Mountains, for the first time in three years. Kevin Colbert’s not the GM. Ben Roethlisberger’s not the quarterback.
And Trubisky’s a pretty good symbol for all of it—in that the Steelers aren’t trying to handle all the transition by taking big swings, instead going at it with numbers, pulling a lot of levers to get a bunch of shots at creating the right mix. So it’s Trubisky, but it’s also Kenny Pickett and Mason Rudolph. It’s new GM Omar Khan, but it’s also Andy Weidl coming in from Philadelphia, and becoming the first guy to hold the assistant GM title in Pittsburgh.
Will Trubisky be the answer for Pittsburgh? Maybe. Maybe not. But there’s more merit to the idea than you might think, mostly because the Steelers are going to give him a legit shot to be one, in what’s shaping up as a summer of opportunity in Latrobe.
The standard here, Mike Tomlin will tell you, is the same. A lot of the faces aren’t.
