2020 Summer Sleeper: Pittsburgh Steelers

In our annual 32-part Summer Sleeper series, DLF scribes identify a lightly-touted player on each NFL roster who may be worthy of your consideration. Our subjects all have varying levels of “sleeperness,” but each merits a bit of in-depth discussion here in the Premium Content section.

To help everybody along, we are going to be categorizing our sleepers under one of three headings:

Super Deep Sleepers – Players who aren’t roster-worthy in 12-team leagues, but are still worth keeping an eye on.
Deep Sleepers – An end of the roster player who is more often than not on the waiver wire in 12-team leagues.
Sleeper – A likely rostered player who makes for a good trade target. Their startup ADP puts them out of the top-175 or so.

Because we aren’t going to give you the likes of mainstream sleepers, most of these players will undoubtedly fizzle. All we are asking is for you to keep an open mind and perhaps be willing to make room for one of these players on your bench. You never know when the next Adam Thielen is going to spring up. Feel free to add your own thoughts about our choice for the designated sleeper, or nominate one of your own in the comments below.

2019 was a bad season for the Pittsburgh Steelers offense and seemingly everyone on it. Ben Roethlisberger missed all but two games with a serious elbow injury while Pro Bowlers James Conner and JuJu Smith-Schuster followed up their 2018 breakout seasons with injury-filled and ineffective campaigns. We won't even mention how the backups to all of those players did. To illustrate just how bad it was, the lone bright spot was a third-round rookie receiver - Diontae Johnson - who still failed to top 700 yards.

But with a whole off-season (and possibly more) to get healthy, the main cogs of the Steelers offense are ready to go and being counted on by dynasty teams all over. So who’s left that could join in the fun? Pittsburgh has a handful of rookies who are currently being snatched up in rookie drafts so it’s hard for them to be considered sleepers just yet. Veterans like James Washington or the aforementioned Johnson are also on many dynasty teams radar so they don’t count either.

Instead, we’re going with a freakish athlete who signed a free-agent contract in the off-season and could see immediate dividends in the Steelers offense.