With the Pittsburgh Steelers on a break before heading to Latrobe for training camp, we’re going to take a look at our expectations for this upcoming season and offer some over/under statistics to weigh in on. The offense wasn’t overly prolific last year, but the defense did put up some big numbers.
That can change in 2023 now that the offense is beginning to mature around second-year quarterback Kenny Pickett, though, and if the Steelers can keep T.J. Watt healthy all year, that will only help everybody be more productive—perhaps especially the defensive backs. So each day we’ll project one stat line, whether for a player or a unit, and share our thoughts before asking you to weigh in on whether you think they will hit the over or the under.
It is your job to project whether or not the over or under will be hit. At the end of the series we will be tallying up the answers for each installment to create a collective pre-training camp snapshot of where you stand heading into the 2023 season.
Stat Line: 120 tackles for Cole Holcomb
Cole Holcomb has been in the NFL for four seasons, starting nearly every game in which he’s played, though he’s also missed a season’s worth of games, including more than half of last season. In his last full season in 2021, he recorded 142 tackles.
That would be a Steelers single-season franchise record, according to Pro Football Reference, the current record belonging to James Farrior, who recorded 141 tackles in 2003. In fact, there have only been 10 seasons in team history in which a player recorded at least 120 combined tackles, the only one fairly recent being Minkah Fitzpatrick’s 124 in 2021.
But given that Holcomb has already proven at the NFL that he can be a tackle magnet, there’s no reason to think he can’t continue to do that in Pittsburgh. And for the record, raw tackle numbers are not necessarily good or bad. It just means that he ends up being in on a lot of plays.
For his career, Holcomb is averaging 7.76 tackles per game. Over a 17-game season, that would translate to roughly 132 tackles, giving him somewhat less than two games’ worth of a cushion in the even that injuries prevent him from playing.
But over the past two seasons, he is averaging 9.17 tackles per game, which actually works out to roughly 156 tackles per game. If he can continue to tackle at the same rate he has in the past two years (and his rate was higher in his seven-game 2022 season than in his 142-tackle 2021 campaign), then he could miss nearly four full games and still hit 120.
So what do you think? Taking these factors and others into consideration, are you taking the over or under 120 tackles for Cole Holcomb? Answer below and at the end of the series we’ll tally all your answers together to see where you stand before we get to training camp.
