While the focus has primarily been on the changing Pittsburgh Steelers roster, there’s been changes to the team’s coaching staff, too. One of the biggest was the addition of LBs Coach Aaron Curry, who will primarily coach up the inside linebackers this season.
During the first day of mandatory minicamp, a week in which Steelers’ positional coaches speak with the media, Curry explained his coaching roots.
“I got hurt in Oakland,” Curry said as tweeted by The Trib’s Chris Adamski. “Rolando McClain was a guy that I believe at the time was the smartest linebacker I’d have ever been around. When he started asking me questions and then started expecting me to have the answers, I realized I was going to be a really good ball coach.”
A former first-round pick once viewed as the “safest” player in his class, Curry didn’t have the career he wanted or anyone expected. He lasted just 2.5 years in Seattle and ended up in Oakland with the Raiders midway through 2011. In 2012, he started the year on the PUP list due to his knee injuries, appearing in only two games that year.
As he said, that free time put him into coach-mode with his teammates, helping them study and prepare when he wasn’t healthy enough to physically take the field. Even coming out of the draft, he was viewed as a highly intelligent linebacker and leader of his Wake Forest defense.
After a brief stint with the New York Giants, Curry retired from playing football in 2013 and immediately got into coaching. He moved back close to home, hired as one of Charlotte’s graduate assistants. During his time there, he coached up the likes of Larry Ogunjobi and Alex Highsmith. In 2019, Curry returned to the NFL but as a coach, hired as an assistant in Seattle where he began his NFL career. Over the last several seasons, he’s worked with the inside and outside linebackers and was hired by Pittsburgh in 2023 as their ILB Coach, replacing Brian Flores and Jerry Olsavsky.
Curry is far from the only new face in the Steelers’ inside linebacker room this season. The players themselves have seen plenty of change with Cole Holcomb, Elandon Roberts, Tanner Muse, and perhaps another veteran added into the mix. Pittsburgh’s off-ball linebackers will be tasked to provide far more splash plays than they did a year ago, making that one of Curry’s focuses.
