Mason Cole enters 2nd season with Steelers looking like long-term center
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When Mason Cole signed with the Pittsburgh Steelers last year, he was joining his third team in three seasons.
The Steelers, meanwhile, were on their fourth starting center in three seasons.
Turns out, both found desired stability — in each other. Cole, by all indications, has been a perfect fit in the literal center of it all on a Steelers’ offensive line that has undergone a period of transition over the past 32 months.
“I love it here,” Cole said after a practice this week. “I love this group; all these guys are my brothers. It just feels like home. But I think this offense has grown so much in the past year that it feels like home for everyone, which I think is huge.”
Cole has seen a lot in the five NFL seasons he’s completed. He was a rookie starter as a third-round pick of the Arizona Cardinals out of Michigan, lost his starting job his second season and regained the starting center gig in 2020. But he was traded before the next season began, and with the Minnesota Vikings in 2021 Cole made seven starts but finished the season at right guard.
When the Steelers signed him to a three-year, $15.75 million contract in March 2022, he wasn’t given any promises where he’d play.
“But I knew deep down center was my best position,” Cole said. “So I just kind of came in and went with the attitude, and that’s kind of how it worked out.”
Cole was the first-team center for the first organized team activities session of 2022, and he hasn’t relinquished the gig. Cole started all 17 games at center for the Steelers last season, and despite his tenure of less than 18 months with the organization quickly has established a presence and gravitas within the Steelers locker room as a trusted veteran.
“Just his leadership, his intelligence, his knowledge of the game of football,” Steelers offensive line coach Pat Meyer said. “His study habits, the way he approaches the game, all of those things, you love having guys like that.”
Cole was joined by fellow then-five-year veteran James Daniels as a free-agent signee in 2022, and 29-year-old Isaac Seumalo was added to the Steelers’ interior line corps this past spring. It took a few years, but in those three the Steelers finally might have found the replacements for the excellent trio that was the heart of the team’s offense for almost a full decade: center Maurkice Pouncey and guards David DeCastro and Ramon Foster, all of whom started for at least nine seasons and retired (DeCastro, unofficially so) within a 15-month span over 2020-2021.
Perhaps teetering on the verge of earning a pejorative “journeyman” label when he joined the Steelers last year, Cole has looked like a player worthy of being the team’s long-term successor to eight-time Pro Bowl honoree Pouncey.
“Coming in, (he and Daniels) knew the legacy of the offensive line here and how good they’d been for countless years beforehand,” Cole said. “Going back almost decades, too, the O-line has been so good here for so long, we knew that to come in here to get this group back to where it was in previous years was important to us as a room. So it’s been good to see some bright spots. There’s still a long way to go and still have a lot of prove, but I think it’s going into the right direction.”
“We didn’t make the playoffs last year, so there’s not much to be satisfied about,” #Steelers C Mason Cole said Wednesday after the team’s 5th organized team activity workout.https://t.co/hV5YHsApAn
— Tribune-Review Sports (@TribSports) June 1, 2023
It was only 54 weeks ago the offensive line looked overmatched during a preseason game at the Jacksonville Jaguars. The unit certainly was burdening a great deal of criticism when the Steelers started 2-6 during the regular season.
But the line palpably improved throughout the season, as the offense’s production increased and the wins came (7-2 down the stretch). Pro Football Focused ranked the Steelers among the top half of the league’s teams in both run- and pass-block grading. It graded Cole as the NFL’s 13th-best of 31 starting centers who qualified, a marked improvement over the Steelers’ center for most of 2021, Kendrick Green. He graded third-from-worst and ultimately was benched in favor of J.C. Hassenauer.
“Mason’s cool,” rookie offensive lineman Spencer Anderson said. “He answers my questions before I even ask them. He’s that kind of guy.”
The appreciation for Cole at the center of it all is reciprocal. Just as the Steelers have found their center, Cole has found a place that feels like home.
“Pat Meyer has done a great job with our whole room, knowing how to coach us, where to coach us at,” Cole said. “Offensively, we have just evolved so much. We were playing so well right now, carrying over from the end of last year. So it’s just been a really good fit for me and a lot of guys. Our O-line room is so tight, it’s part of what we try to do, build that room to be tight on and off the field, and I think it makes a big difference on the field.”
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