The Pittsburgh Steelers have moved on from one of their depth pieces on the offense, cutting Trey Sermon from the active roster.
The Steelers made a plethora of moves following their signing of Asante Samuel Jr. to their practice squad. That move sent shockwaves through their personnel, and led to to two cuts and one promotion. Will Howard was elevated off of the reserved/injured list, while Darrick Forrest was cut from the practice squad on top of Sermon being waived from the active roster.
Now, the Steelers have a slightly less deep rushing room but allow themselves to insert some youth into an aging quarterback room by adding Howard. Howard won the national championship last season with Ohio State and is 24 years old.
Sermon was a multi-year collegiate star, spending three seasons at the University of Oklahoma before transferring to Ohio State for his final season in college.
Sermon will now be a free agent, which is a familiar task for the young running back. Sermon was selected by the San Francisco 49ers with the 88th overall pick in the 3rd round of the 2021 NFL Draft, spending parts of two seasons with the team before getting released just ahead of the 2022 regular season.
Sermon then spent all of the 2022 season with the Philadelphia Eagles, where he appeared in two games before getting released during the 2023 regular season in mid-September. He then signed with the
He signed with the Steelers in May of 2025, and went through camp and preseason with the team before getting released in final roster cuts. The team re-signed him, albeit to the practice squad, to begin the season. Sermon received a call up to the active roster, and appeared in one game during his time on active roster since then.
Now, Sermon will have another chance to test free agency. He is 26 years old, so it is possible a team will take a chance on his youth due to the high level of injuries across the league this season. The Steelers, on the other hand, will have
Tennessee Titans fans correctly have a lot of contempt for the franchise right now. Everyone can admit this team needed a chance to catch its breath. The Week 10 bye provided an opportunity to reset.
After more than a month of terrible play, the team fired Brian Callahan and started looking toward the future. In the meantime, interim coach Mike McCoy has done his best to keep this team afloat while also dealing with players like Jeffery Simmons and Calvin Ridley missing multiple games.
With a chance to step back and evaluate during the bye week, McCoy and his offensive staff should have come to one definitive conclusion. This team couldn’t run a successful screen if their season depended on it, and they need to remove it from the playbook completely.
Sure, the plays out of the wildcat formation are the most recent idoicy on the minds of Titans fans, but the screen game has been the most consistently frustrating part of the team’s playbook since Week 1. Penalties and poor execution have routinely doomed nearly every screen the Titans have run this season.
Whether they call them “run solutions” or something else, the quick screens have killed the momentum created by the offense whenever they have been called. Whether the play gets blown up, a lineman goes downfield illegally, or there is offensive pass interference, the play is nearly guaranteed to lose yards and to hurt the offense.
Instead of calling any of those plays ever again, the Titans coaching staff should consider more play-action passes. Most of Cam Ward’s successful plays have come from play-action concepts, and both play-action passes and screens serve functionally the same purpose.
If the concern is that the defense is crowding the box or coming up too aggressively to stop the run, screens and play-action passes take advantage of that aggression. If one type of play (screens) is killing you and the other is leading to explosive plays and touchdowns (play-action), then the conclusion should be straightforward.
This coaching staff needs to remember that their sole job is to help Ward (and to a lesser extent, this whole rookie class) develop. With just the small change of eliminating the handful of screen passes per game and replacing them with play-action passes, the Titans could make life easier for Ward and create a more fun and explosive offense.