Pat Freiermuth Camp Update — August 31: Held Out, Now On the Record
2026 NFL Season · Monday, Aug 31
For the first time all preseason, Pat Freiermuth's absence from a game is sourced rather than inferred: Bob Labriola named him among the twenty-seven core players held out of the finale by design. The tight end room settled at three — Freiermuth, Darnell Washington and Robert Tonyan — and the snap-split question crosses into the season untouched.
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The tight end room came out of cut-day weekend three deep, and the week's real development for Pat Freiermuth is a piece of paper: for the first time all preseason, his absence from a game is on the record rather than inferred. Bob Labriola at Steelers.com named Freiermuth among the 27 core players held out of Thursday's finale in Buffalo, writing that none of them had any chance to sustain an injury in a meaningless game. Our last episode had to read his absence from the Jets game out of the fact that he appeared nowhere in the coverage, and said as much; this one comes with a byline and a reason — rest by design, not injury.
The roster around him took its final shape. Robert Tonyan stuck as the number three tight end after arriving as a June minicamp tryout, per Brian Batko's 53-man analysis at Steelers.com — which leaves Freiermuth and Darnell Washington as the two ahead of him. Lake McRee was waived, per Teresa Varley at Steelers.com, after catching a five-yard touchdown from Will Howard in the finale, and no tight end was claimed off waivers, per Alex Kozora at Steelers Depot. No roster drama at the position was reported all weekend.
What the week did not produce is any evidence on the question June said would decide everything: the snap split with Washington, and the 12-personnel usage that would feed both. Freiermuth and Washington were held out together, so the two of them have not been charted together in a single preseason game. That question crosses into Week One untouched.
Back in June we called Freiermuth the most predictable player in the file — five seasons of per-game scoring inside a narrow band — and said the one force that could move the band was Mike McCarthy's offense, a scheme with a long history of feeding tight ends. Four weeks and three preseason games later, that thesis is untested rather than disproved: no coverage has put him on the field in any of the three, and the one absence that is now on the record was by design. We'll return to this one once real charting exists.
_Data via nflverse._
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