AFC North Notes: Bengals, Browns, Steelers

Bengals

• The Athletic’s Paul Dehner Jr. mentions Bengals sixth-round RB Rodney Anderson will likely start the season on the PUP list. 
• The Bengals appear to be set with Billy Price at C and OL Trey Hopkins competing for the starting left guard position at best, first man off the bench at worst. (Dehner)
• Dehner predicts G Christian Westerman will win the starting left guard spot. 

Browns

As one of the key players on the Browns defense, DE Myles Garrett has high expectations for the 2019 season and how he can be unleashed with a new coaching staff. 

“I hopefully have more freedom to be the player I want to be,” Garrett said via Cleveland.com’s Jake Burns. “[Former DC] Gregg [Williams] was more like: ‘You win with these two moves. I don’t want to see anything else out of you.’ It’s kind of hard with two moves. I feel like you can’t always be so predictable.”

“You can be as strong or fast as you want, but speed chop and power move aren’t always going to work,” Garrett continued. “You have to mix up what you’re doing. Sometimes you have to stutter step, sometimes you have to spin inside, you have to run some games. You have to have some freedom to throw different looks at them, and we didn’t always have that.”

Steelers

Steelers RB James Conner said doctors told him he had “about a week” left to live back in 2015 prior to treating him for stage two Hodgkins Lymphoma. 

“My heart, I got tumors growing all around it,” Conner said, via SI.com. “He said you got about a week — if you didn’t get this treated, you had about a week — at the rate it was growing.”

Conner previously credited the knee injury he suffered with saving his life.

“If I never had this knee injury I would’ve been on the field and I probably would’ve been feeling out of shape and that I’ve got to work even harder,” Conner said, via USA Today. “I’d be taking shots to the chest. I could’ve died on the field.”