Are Pittsburgh Steelers fans underrating the reigning Defensive Player of the Year? While not universally applicable, it does seem as though there are a lot of people who are not particularly worried about the San Francisco 49ers’ Nick Bosa having an effective, even dominant game after skipping almost the entire offseason.
The fifth-year edge defender orchestrated an old-school holdout, only showing up to the team facility in recent days after signing the largest defensive contract in NFL history. But how many formal practices does he need to be even 90 percent of himself? Steelers head coach Mike Tomlin certainly isn’t hedging his bets, nor is he foolish enough to think they’ll only see him coming off the offensive left edge at LT Dan Moore Jr.
“First, it’s not just a Dan Moore problem”, he said of Bosa on the Mike Tomlin Show yesterday with Bob Pompeani. “They’re so multiple in their fronts. It’s a Chuks [Okorafor] problem. It might be an interior guard problem. The fluidity in which they have shown the ability to move him and other pieces in their front is a component of what makes them so challenging”.
Bosa actually played most of his snaps on the left side in 2022 when he was named the Defensive Player of the Year, though he still had about 300 snaps on the right side. He was closer to a split in 2021, but still saw more time on the left. No matter where he lines up, though, he is dangerous.
“He is a big-time playmaker. It’s never a one-man challenge”, Tomlin said. “We ain’t talking about a guy like that. Not many opportunities where you see T.J. [Watt] in one-on-one circumstances, so you should assume the same regarding Bosa”.
“Those guys are who they are because they routinely win in one-on-one circumstances”, he added, of players like Watt and Bosa. “Just because we apply different people schematically to minimize him or guys like him’s impact on the game, it is still a big-time challenge. That’s why he is who he is”.
For perspective, there were only three games last season in which Bosa didn’t record a sack, and he never had a game without a pressure. In fact, he generated at least four pressures 11 times during the regular season in 2022 in 16 games. He had 90 pressures overall, including 49 sacks and quarterback hits.
48 of his pressures came off the defensive left side, where he rushed 60 percent of the time. But he also had 42 pressures off the right side, including the majority of his sacks, on just 40 percent of his pass-rushing snaps.
Suffice it to say he’s going to be a problem as long as he’s on the field, and often enough, it’s going to be a problem for multiple Steelers at the same time. They are not going to leave him on his own any more than Steelers opponents do Watt.
