Pat Freiermuth Camp Update — August 23: Another Week Off the Stat Sheet

Quiet week for Pat Freiermuth, and this one looks like the planned kind. He appears nowhere in the coverage of Friday's 17-to-nothing loss to the Jets — Josh Carney's positional grades at Steelers Depot list the tight end production as Robert Tonyan two catches for 17 yards, Lake McRee two for 46, a 10-yard catch for Riley Nowakowski, and one catch for five yards for Darnell Washington — which reads like a starter held out alongside Aaron Rodgers, Mason Rudolph and the injured receivers, though no report we can attribute states it. No new practice charting on Freiermuth surfaced in the window either, so the freshest substantive read remains Mike DeFabo's report at The Athletic from early August: a much bigger piece of the offense, featured in the two-minute drill and over the middle.

Back in June we called Freiermuth the most predictable player in the file — five seasons of per-game scoring inside a narrow band, held there by targets that never stayed — and said the one force that could move the band was the new offense, a McCarthy scheme with a long history of feeding tight ends. That thesis has now gone three weeks without contradiction and two games without live evidence, which is a normal August for an established starter whose team is resting its veterans. The snap-split question with Washington, the number June said would decide everything, got no adjudication Friday: Washington played and caught one short pass, Freiermuth apparently sat, and starters-versus-backups comparisons tell us nothing.

The checkable things this week: whether Freiermuth plays Thursday in the finale at Buffalo and where any targets come from, and the 12-personnel and Washington snap patterns once real charting resumes. Rosters cut to 53 on Sunday, August thirtieth — no drama for him there, but the roster around him gets its final shape. We'll check after cut day.

_Data via nflverse._