A short board Tuesday: Pittsburgh loses a receiver for multiple weeks, New England loses the man protecting its quarterback's blind side, and the NFL's discipline office opens a file on Dre Greenlaw.
Start with the Steelers, because a finger injury reads softer than it is. Roman Wilson is expected to miss multiple weeks, and Pittsburgh ruled him out for the remainder of Sunday's game with the issue. A receiver's hands are the job. A finger that costs multiple weeks is a finger that costs him his releases and his quarterback's trust, and trust gets rebuilt slower than a joint heals. My read: the Steelers fill those snaps from inside the room rather than outside it, and the real cost lands in the sub packages that now have to be reassembled on the fly. Whoever has been waiting on exactly this kind of opening is the Steeler who benefits. If the room holds up over the next month, I'm wrong about how much Wilson was actually worth.
New England's problem is bigger, and it isn't close. Left tackle Will Campbell was ruled out of Sunday's win over the Raiders after suffering a right knee injury and did not return; he's believed to have a knee sprain and is expected to miss time. That the Patriots won that game without him tells you about the opponent, not about the plan. Left tackle is the one spot on an offense where the replacement gets isolated alone on obvious passing downs, and the dominoes run downhill from there: a tight end stays in to chip, a back has to help, and the routes behind it get shorter. I expect New England to scheme around the position with max protection and quicker throws rather than ask one man to hold up. What would prove me wrong is a clean pocket on early downs next week without help.
Dre Greenlaw is the wild card, and there's no club attached to this one. He was ejected from Sunday's game, and the NFL will review that conduct for further discipline, with another suspension on the table. The word "another" is doing a lot of work in that report. Repeat offenders get priced at a different rate by the league office than first-timers, so a fine is the floor here, and my expectation is games missed on top of it. The practical cost is a defense re-planning the middle of the field for however long the absence runs. If the review decides the ejection itself was punishment enough, I'll have misread the league's appetite.
The league-level read: two AFC clubs got thinner at two different layers of the roster, and only one of those layers is replaceable by committee. Skill spots rotate. Blind-side protection does not. Ranked by actual cost in wins, New England's bad news is first and it isn't close, and the Steelers' is a roster-management problem rather than a football one.
