Of their Pittsburgh Steelers six outside free agent signings they’ve made so far this offseason, it’s not hard to get really excited about the one that they signed off the proverbial street, inside linebacker Myles Jack. On Sunday, Steelers head coach Mike Tomlin, who is currently in Florida for the annual league meetings, addressed the team’s signing of Jack when he met the media.
“Myles is a good football player,” Tomlin said of Jack on Sunday, according to Teresa Varley of steelers.com. “He is a see-ball, get-ball type. You can always utilize those guys. He needs no endorsement from me. I think the thing that really fires me up most about his acquisition is the level of excitement that he had. It didn’t take long in the phone conversation to realize that he was just as fired up about potentially being a part of us, as we were about potentially having him. And you guys know I live by the philosophical approach, volunteers not hostages.”
Jack, who was released be the Jacksonville Jaguars on March 15 after six seasons with the team that originally drafted him out of UCLA, has since talked about that phone conversation that he had with Tomlin prior to signing.
“Coach Tomlin said defenses win championships and we are trying to win a championship and we’ve got to do that through defense,” Jack said in a sit-down interview with Mike Prisuta of steelers.com. “Once he said that, my eyes lit up on the phone and I said let’s go ahead and get it done in Pittsburgh. I am excited.”
As for the style of play that we should expect from Jack now that he’s with the Steelers? Just as Tomlin described on Sunday.
“I am just going to run and hit,” Jack said a few days ago. “I am here to work. I am here to contribute. I can’t wait to get to it.
“I have a relentless approach. I am going to run and hit. That is what I know. I am going to know the playbook, that is what I have to do. But at the end of the day my job is to get to the football no matter what.”
Jack made sure to also talk about what he knows about the Steelers organization since signing with the team.
“It’s definitely a close-knit family organization,” Jack said of the Steelers. “You can just feel it. People are happy to be at work. People are happy to be a part of it. You can feel it.”
Tomlin, as you can imagine, is excited that Jack is excited to be part of the Steelers defense staring this season.
“It was really exciting to hear the level of enthusiasm that he had about being a part of this,” Tomlin reportedly said of Jack on Sunday
In his six seasons with the Jaguars, Jack registered 513 total tackles, three interceptions and two forced fumbles. He also had 6.5 sacks and 15 total passes defensed during that span. He has played in 88 total games with 82 total starts. Last season, Jack was the Jaguars’ leading tackler with 108 tackles. The UCLA product has now had at least 90 tackles in four of his six NFL seasons.
The Steelers were awful against the run last season and the hope now is that they will be much better in that area in 2022 now that Jack is in the fold and with former first-round draft pick Devin Bush being another year removed from his season-ending knee injury that occurred in Week 6 of the 2020 season.
As previously noted by us, Jack’s deal that he signed the Steelers is for two years and it totals out at $16 million.
