FOXBOROUGH, Mass. \u2013 The New England Patriots announced that they have traded S Kyle Dugger to the Pittsburgh Steelers and signed rookie S John Saunders Jr. to the 53-man roster from the Miami practice squad.<\/p>\n
Saunders, 24, originally signed with the Miami Dolphins as a rookie free agent out of Mississippi on May 9, 2025, and began the season on the practice squad. The 6-foot-2, 211-pounder began his college career at Miami (Ohio) before transferring to Mississippi following the 2022 season. He led the SEC in turnovers last season with seven turnovers (3 interceptions and 4 forced fumbles). Saunders had 11 interceptions in 49 collegiate games.<\/p>\n
Dugger, 29, was originally drafted by New England in the second-round of the 2020 NFL Draft out of Lenoir-Rhyne. The 6-foot-1, 216-pounder, has played in 81 games with 69 starts and has accumulated 412 total tackles, 3\u00bd sacks, 9 interceptions with two returned for a touchdown, 24 passes defensed, 3 forced fumbles and 2 fumble recoveries with one returned for a touchdown. Dugger played in seven games with four starts in 2025 and registered 14 total tackles and 3 special teams tackles.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"FOXBOROUGH, Mass. \u2013 The New England Patriots announced that they have traded S Kyle Dugger to the Pittsburgh…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":20058,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[9],"tags":[13938,13939,73,75,74,3780],"class_list":["post-20057","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-pittsburgh","tag-hp-article","tag-hp-featured","tag-pittsburgh","tag-pittsburgh-headlines","tag-pittsburgh-news","tag-transactions"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20057","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=20057"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20057\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/20058"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=20057"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=20057"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=20057"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}