Who are you? What are you? What is your identity?
Those are the questions that continue to be asked about the Pittsburgh Steelers through the first six games of the 2023 season.
Head coach Mike Tomlin, who stated over the weekend to Steelers.com’s Bob Labriola that revealing a team’s identity in today’s NFL is teeing things up for opponents, doubled down on not needing to publicly identify the team’s identity, especially early in the season, during his weekly press conference with reporters Tuesday.
Pointedly, Tomlin called a declaration of identity “a stupid endeavor at this juncture.”
“I think in 2023, when you’re talking about team identity, you’re talking more intangible quality things: grit, a mindset, the approach in which you take the circumstances. Are you a calculated risk-taking group? Are you a fundamentalist group? Are you a small menu group? Those are the things that really kind of comprise identity today,” Tomlin said to reporters Tuesday, according to video via the Steelers’ YouTube page. “If you start talking about we’re a running group, then people are gonna show up in goal-line defense in open field on you. And so it doesn’t behoove you to marry yourself to an identity. All it does is make the sledding more difficult.
“In 2023, there’s so much specialization in today’s game. It just is. The utilization of people in very specific places on offense and defense. It makes it a matchup game. It makes it a situational game. You can have an agenda in which you desire, but there are things that people can do to push you off that agenda regardless of what your intentions are in 2023. …Those are just strategic components of today’s game and that’s why it makes declaration of identity a stupid endeavor at this juncture.”
While Tomlin’s comments to Labriola Sunday and to reporters Tuesday certainly makes sense, the fact remains that the Steelers might not exactly have an identity. Throughout the offseason the Steelers seemingly built towards being a bully-ball team with an upgraded offensive line, a physical blocking tight end added in rookie Darnell Washington, and the continued development of running backs Najee Harris and Jaylen Warren.
But early in the season the Steelers haven’t exactly been that bully-ball team.
That said, they showed that in the fourth quarter on Sunday, imposing their will on the Rams’ defense, taking control of the game and putting Los Angeles away when it counted.
Make no mistake about it: the Steelers are still trying to figure out what their identity is offensively. They should know who they are as a team though: one that plays good-to-great defense, forces turnovers and wins some rather ugly, low-scoring games.
