There isn’t a spot on the roster that the Pittsburgh Steelers spent more time on this offseason, at least in terms of quantity of personnel moves, than the inside linebacker position. They either released or allowed to leave their top three players from last season, all of them playing significant starting roles.
Five of the six inside linebackers who were either on the 53-man roster or Reserve/Injured List at the end of last season are now gone (Tae Crowder is the one you’re not thinking of). The only carryover is 2022 seventh-rounder Mark Robinson. They added Cole Holcombe and Elandon Roberts early in free agency as starters, later also signing Tanner Muse and Nick Kwiatkoski.
But have they gotten better over Myles Jack, Robert Spillane, Devin Bush, and Marcus Allen from last year with this current group? Perhaps more pertinently, is the inside linebacker position no longer a weakness? Is there a weaker spot on the roster? Ray Fittipaldo of the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette doesn’t think so. It was his response when he was asked what the weakest area of the roster was.
“I would say the inside linebackers. They think they upgraded there, but they [thought] they’d upgraded there for the last five seasons, too, and nothing that they’ve done has really worked”, he said on 93.7 The Fan on the Cook and Joe Show.
Neither Holcomb or Roberts really offer anything to get all that excited about, particularly Roberts, who is simply a blue-collar thumper who will probably spend a fair amount of time on the sidelines. As for the latter, whatever intrigue he might bring is tempered by his spotty track record in coverage and the fact that he is coming off of a season-ending foot injury.
“We’ll see how they do”, Fittipaldo said, “but we all know that they’ve been good defensively for most of the last 5-6 years, but it always comes back to mismatches in the middle of that defense, pass defense, those guys holding up, and they just haven’t been able to find the right guys in the middle”.
The inside linebacker position as a whole has been at least a partial weakness since the moment Ryan Shazier went down with a severe spinal injury in the second half of the 2017 season. They’ve gone through a ton of options since then, starting with Sean Spence, later adding the likes of Jon Bostic, Mark Barron, Avery Williamson, Joe Schobert, and the guys who were here last year.
Holcomb and Roberts might not be the sexy names that were on the market, but could they just so happen to be the right fit for the Steelers’ defense? That’s the hope, anyway, assuming that they can play up to their full potential.
Roberts can be a really good run defender with his diagnostic ability and his skills shedding blocks. Holcomb at his best is another smart player who is a sideline-to-sideline tackler, and at least in theory should be able to hold up in coverage. Maybe everything actually works out and they hold up.
Or maybe we’ll be back to the drawing board in March, as we have been annually for the past half-decade.
