Aug 24, 2016
  • Rob DemovskyESPN Staff Writer
 
GREEN BAY, Wis. – The quest, ever since Kyle Steuck signed with the Green Bay Packers on Aug. 14, was this: Get the rookie offensive lineman to pose for a picture with veteran left guard Josh Sitton.

It never happened.

So if you want proof they’re actually two different people, you’re just going to have to take our word for it and believe that the one in the No. 77 jersey is Steuck and the one who wears No. 71 is Sitton.
“We call him ‘Little Sitty,’” Packers left tackle David Bakhtiari said after a recent practice.

Sitton doesn’t mind at all.

“Hey, he’s a good-looking dude,” Sitton said. “He’s definitely got the hair and the beard and the blonde streaks a little bit in the hair and beard.”

Steuck -- who is living every local kid’s dream, growing up in Green Bay and signing with the hometown team -- admits he’s been mistaken for Sitton a few times already. At 6-foot-2 and 310 pounds, he’s an inch shorter and eight pounds lighter, but from a distance, it’s negligible.
One of the first pictures of Steuck in uniform to hit the internet before his first practice with the Packers drew immediate comparisons to Sitton.

If you thought Steuck was copying Sitton’s look because he grew up in Green Bay, he says that’s not where he got it. Steuck went to college at Northern Michigan as a short-haired kid and left with the full-on mountain-man look.

Sitton wasn’t always a long hair, either; there are plenty of pictures from his college years at Central Florida with a close crop.

“He was rocking that long before I did,” Steuck said. “In high school, I had the shaved-head look – like No. 1 on the clippers. Then I went to college and a bunch of the older guys had long hair and I was like, ‘We’ll give it the old college try,’ and it stuck.”

Of course, the “Little Sitty” nickname has stuck.

“If we’re giving you s---, it means we like you,” Sitton said.

Steuck said Sitton and the rest of the veterans have helped him get up to speed after he joined the Packers more than two weeks into training camp.

“These guys have been awesome helping out,” said Steuck, who participated in the Packers’ rookie minicamp in May on a tryout basis but had been helping coach his high school team before he got the call back.

“They help with plays, calls, protections, adjustments, technique, form. You name it, and they help with it, which is awesome. No one’s really salty at all. They literally just help you with everything. And that’s great because you could film of arguably one of the best offensive lines in the NFL and see how they do things and if you just watch that you’re learning from that.”

But he still hasn’t posted for a picture with his lookalike.
“You missed your chance the other day,” Steuck said this week. “We were doing a drill and instead of him putting his hands in my chest, he just came up and hugged me and just held me. And he was like, ‘I got you.’ It was really cool.”