Veteran CB Patrick Peterson’s first five games as a Pittsburgh Steeler have been a little rocky. He’s shown leadership and mentorship and has an interception this season but has also allowed big plays, struggled to get players to the ground, and is adjusting to a new scheme and role.
On the latest episode of his All Things Covered podcast alongside co-host Bryant McFadden, Peterson outlined two areas of his game he wants to be better in on the other side of the bye week.
“Me personally, I wanna get better at my open field tackling,” Peterson told McFadden.
Missed tackles from the secondary have been a recurring issue this year and continued in Sunday’s win over the Baltimore Ravens. Per our Josh Carney, four of the team’s six missed tackles in Week Five came from the secondary. Peterson “led” the way with two of them while CB Levi Wallace and FS Minkah Fitzpatrick each had misses.
On the season, we’ve charged Peterson with a team-high six missed tackles. His 28.5 percent missed tackles rate is also higher than any other starter and a number that must come down. Pittsburgh has yielded too much YAC this year and allowed short gains to turn into medium ones or medium plays turn into chunk yardage. On the season, Peterson, Keanu Neal, and Fitzpatrick are among the team-leaders in missed tackles (to be fair to Fitzpatrick, he has an acceptably low miss rate) while Wallace isn’t far behind.
Beyond getting runners on the ground, Peterson also wants to work on a pre-snap element of his game.
“Getting disguise game a little bit better in the third down game,” he said.
Normally the team’s starting left cornerback, Peterson bumps to the slot in dime packages and obvious passing situations. He’s part of the team’s inverted coverages, often rotating to the deep portion of the field to replace a safety and, as he noted, has begun to blitz more. He’s blitzed twice over the last two weeks after not blitzing at all the first three games.
Doing either of those things means needing to disguise and time things up well. If he’s rotating coverage, he can’t get to his spot too early otherwise the quarterback will be able to decipher the coverage and the disguise will fail. The same principle works as a blitzer. Tip your hand and the quarterback and protection know where the rush is coming from.
“I played a little [deep half safety], played a little bit of man, played a little of fire zone, come off the edge a little bit,” Peterson said. “That package is kind of in now. So working on the disguise a little bit better to try to confuse the quarterbacks.”
With rookie CB Joey Porter Jr. emerging, we’ll see if Peterson’s snap count or role shifts at all exiting the bye week. Late in the second half of the Ravens game, Peterson lost playing time and was on the sidelines for several defensive snaps for the first time all season. Wallace got similar treatment.
Check out the full episode of the podcast below.
