The Pittsburgh Steelers overhauled their inside linebacker room this past offseason and part of that included the team signing unrestricted free agent Cole Holcomb to a three-year, $18 million contract. On Wednesday, Jim Miller and Pat Kirwan of SiriusXM Radio discussed the Steelers’ inside linebacker position during their show, Movin’ the Chains, and the latter talked very optimistically about Holcomb.
“Cole Holcomb’s very interesting to me,” Kirwan said. “The seven starts [last season] is a downgrade for him. The 69 tackles, though, in seven starts, that’s ten tackles a game. The guy is a tackling machine. So, if you ever got 17 games out of this wild man, you should be thinking he’s gonna get 160 to 170 tackles, if he can last. And that’s gonna have to be the part for him to see if he can do that.”
Last season, Holcomb, who was selected by Washington in the fifth round of the 2019 NFL Draft out of North Carolina, played in just seven games due to a foot injury that ultimately required surgery. In those seven games he did indeed register 69 total tackles to go along with one quarterback hit and one defensed pass. However, Holcomb only registered one tackle for loss last season.
Rewinding back to the 2021 season, Holcomb played 16 games on his way to registering 142 tackles, two quarterback hits, seven passes defensed and two interceptions. Once again, however, he was light in the tackle for loss department with just two.
Lack of tackles for loss the last two seasons aside, Holcomb did register 63 total stops in that span of 23 total games that he played in, according to Pro Football Focus. A stop, by the way, is a tackle that constitutes a “failure” for the offense on a play. To put that into some sort of perspective, all Steelers inside linebackers registered a total of 166 stops over the course of their last two seasons, a span of 34 games.
Obviously, the key thing when it comes to Holcomb is him overcoming that foot injury from last season. While he was reportedly limited throughout the team’s offseason program, all signs point to the fifth-year inside linebacker being ready to go come the start of training camp. The Steelers certainly need him ready and raring to go by the start of the 2023 regular season so that he can be their tackling machine.
The last time that the Steelers had an inside linebacker exceed 120 total tackles in a season was in 2015 and that was done by Lawrence Timmons, who had 132 that season, Seven of those were for loss, by the way. Can Holcomb top the 120 number in 2023? Can he exceed 160 like Kirwan suggested? It certainly sounds like he can at least hit the 120 mark, especially if he stays healthy for all 17 regular-season games.
“Cole Holcomb, to me, he’s got the mindset of a Steeler,” Kirwan said. “Now, can he stay on the field? That that’s his whole issue.”
