The offensive platform of the Pittsburgh Troy Fautenu Pittsburgh listens to the instructions during the OTA of the NFL football team in Pittsburgh, Wednesday May 28, 2025. (AP photo / Gene J. Puskar)
Pittsburgh (AP) – The moment when the recruit season of Troy Faratanu stopped painful is seized in his brain.
Asked to relive him on Wednesday after a team activity organized by rains, the offensive tackle of the Pittsburgh steelers raised his right hand and pointed out to one of the end areas in the fields nestled behind the club’s training center.
It was a Friday at the end of September. The 20th choice in total in the recovery of 2024 had come from the first start of his career in week 2 against Denver, fully healed with a stride left knee which forced him to miss most of the pre-season. Fautetanu trotted on the training ground with the rest of the offense for a series of conversion exercises in 2 points called “seven shots”.
Fauatanu fell to settle in the protection of passes when her right knee “found himself in the bizarre ground.” The rest of its 6 -foot 4 inch and 317 pound frames continued to move. His leg did not do it. The result? A tear in the ligament designed to keep the knee stable. The end of the season surgery quickly followed, with persistent doubts as to whether it could come back not far behind.
“There have been a lot of nights when you can’t really see the light on the other side of the tunnel,” said Fautetanu.
It was not only intimidating physical rehabilitation, but the emotional assessment that accompanied it. He knew as a first round choice that his work was to get on the ground as quickly as possible. Now it was gone. He had already bought tickets so that his family came to watch him play. Now they jumped on planes to watch him stand up in sweating rather than on the ground in his uniform n ° 76.
For a player of Polynesian origin who counts the temple of renown of the Troy Polamalu Steelers as one of his models, and who had never really been injured before and now found himself by recovering a few thousand kilometers from their home.
It seemed extremely difficult at the moment. With hindsight now, he thinks it was also growth. He realized – with the help of almost daily phone calls with his mother, MA, that he had to stop trying to advance quickly until the end and to look at the healing process instead.
“I would say that I was sometimes my biggest enemy, thinking about the future when I really had to locate myself in what was going on that day,” said Fauatanu. “But I had the impression that once I locked myself and I really focus on day -to -day, I really like to have turned a corner on my recovery.”
The steelers feel confident enough in the recovery of the Faratanu according to which they finally executed a long -term plan for Fauatanu to start right with Broderick Jones – their first choice in 2023 – moving to the left tackle. (The true beneficiary of the misfortune of Fauatanu can be Dan Moore Jr., who held the set to the left all the last season when Jones was forced to stay on the right side with Fauatanu. Moore signed a massive four -year agreement with Tennessee in March.)
The plan is to slowly bring Faratanu. It is a plan with which Fauatanu is entirely on board, although he would lie if he wanted to be cautious in the wind when this sponsor of familiar adrenaline struck the first time that he aligned himself when the OTA began on Tuesday.
“Once I took this first representative, it’s like …” I don’t want to go out. I don’t want to want to go out “,” said Fauatanu laughing, briefly covering his mouth after pronouncing an explanive to punctuate his argument. “So yes, it’s also like trying to be intelligent, but I’m a competitor, guy. I love being there.”
The same goes for the Steelers, who have invested massively in the offensive line in recent years when their search for a Franchise quarterrière continues. If everything goes as planned, Jones and Fautenu will serve as a book greenhouse, with the second year Center Zach Frazier in the middle, flanked by the second year goalkeeper Mason McCormick and the veteran Isaac Seamalo.
Fautanu does not think that it will take long in the group to gelify, in part because they are already “super tight”, a link that was firmly settled last fall while it was sailing on an uncertain path to the field which was more intimidating than expected.
It was not fun. But it could have been necessary for someone who believes that everything happens for a reason.
“It made me hungry than me, and I was damn ready to play,” he said. “But yes, I mean these nights sitting in my room like the man, I will come back, this, that and the other. There are a lot of thoughts that cross my head, but at the end of the day, I succeeded and I have the impression that this is what made me stronger. This is what will do me and feel to play the best possible for this team.”
