FanHouse Limas Sweed

The Steelers are 1-2, without Troy Polamalu, and face a huge test against the Chargers on Sunday night. The biggest story line heading into the weekend? Ben Roethlisberger and the Steelers' offensive line headlining a WWE Raw (!) event Monday night.

Evidently, there are concerns that Big Ben and his five fat friends aren't taking their day jobs seriously. Because everyone knows that true professionals think about football every waking moment.

In any event, left tackle Max Starks isn't worried. Via the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review:

In his two-year NFL career Limas Sweed has seven catches for 69 yards. He already has three big drops.

After Sweed dropped a wide-open touchdown that would have proven to be a game-clincher against the Bengals, he now has one catch for five yards this year and one drop that would have been much more important. That drop reminded everyone he also had a key drop in the AFC Championship game against the Ravens. He also dropped a bomb he should have caught against the Browns in the finale of the 2008 regular season.

When I started studying the Steelers' offensive line in 2006, it sprung from a lot of frustration. Week after week, you heard TV announcers talking about the Steelers' dominating line and its smash-mouth running attack. But as I watched, I saw Sean Mahan being driven backwards play after play, Max Starks struggling to block speed rushers and Kendall Simmons looking much weaker than his reputation.

It's taken four years, but these days it's hard to find any NFL fan who isn't aware that the Steelers' offensive line is one of the biggest stumbling blocks that could keep Pittsburgh from defending its Super Bowl title. That's progress I guess. Nowadays if I write that Max Starks sometimes struggles with speed rushes, or that Chris Kemoeatu sometimes seems lost, I'm telling everyone what they already know.

Cut-N-Go is Fantasy Football FanHouse's daily gathering of links from around the web, covering the goings-on in NFL Training Camp which have an impact on fantasy value.

The Kansas City Chiefs got really bad news on Sunday after quarterback Matt Cassel went down Saturday night with an injury.

It appears, according to Jason Cole of Yahoo! Sports, that Cassel could miss the season opener as he'll be out two to four weeks with a strained medial collateral ligament in his knee. The injury isn't expected to require surgery but will force Tyler Thigpen into action.

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The plan was for Ben Roethlisberger to ride the pine as a rookie. That changed when Tommy Maddox went down two weeks into the 2004 season. Five years, two Super Bowl championships and one helmetless asphalt head-butt later, it's all worked out.

It's the preseason, but you always want to see your team win. So tonight was a good night for Steelers fans, even if it was the third-team Steelers beating the third-team Cardinals 20-10.

But since it was the preseason, individual efforts were much more important than the final score.

In the first game at least, there was more good than bad for Pittsburgh.

One of my favorite moves on fantasy football draft day is taking a late-round gamble and letting everyone else laugh at me. You can have the first round, just let me pick late. To illustrate, here's an actual message board post last season after one of my drafts: "Commish Snyder purposefully did not draft a kicker so he could take a flier on yet another long shot (Steve Slaton of the Texans). I'm sure he'll say it will pay off in the long run."

My response? "I'll end up dropping Patrick Crayton (my fifth WR) for a kicker before week 1 when Slaton wins the Houston gig -- unless someone suffers a season-ending injury, in which case I'll drop that person."

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The NFL may be worrying about Twitter and most NFL teams treat the simplest news that is bound to get out as if it's a state secret, but with open practices and quality reporters, it's pretty easy to get a good idea of what's going on at training camp.

Between Jim Wexell's tweeting and posts at Steel City Insider, vrabinec's incredibly detailed posts over at draftsteel.com and the rest of the in-person rundowns over at SteelerFury.com and Behind The Steel Curtain, there's a heck of a lot of good information out there.

Here's a summary of some notes culled from the first-person reports.