It might not sound like much, but the three snaps that Pittsburgh Steelers OLB T.J. Watt played on the right side of the defense last week could potentially lead to something significant. Defensive coordinator Teryl Austin talked about it during the week, and Watt did as well. It wasn’t by accident that he wound up there, and it probably won’t be a one-game thing.
As Austin explained, it’s all about countering what offenses are trying to do to limit him. “It would be dumb for us not to plan for it and to try to give him some options to get free to rush the pass because he does affect the game so much”, he said. Watt added via the team’s YouTube channel, “We all know what’s going on, so we’re just trying to find ways around it”.
For the vast majority of his career, Watt has almost exclusively been a one-side pass rusher. Following his rookie season, he never took more than a couple dozen rushes from the opposite side, at most, in any one season.
But he did play on the right side as a rookie before moving to his more familiar left side a year later. He knows how to rush from over there, so it’s not a matter of projecting how he would handle it. It’s just building back up that muscle memory and employing it at advantageous times.
“I’m open to it if it’s gonna help put the guys in advantageous positions to make plays”, Watt said himself when asked about working on the other side of the formation, or even elsewhere in the defense. “At the end of the day, I want to affect the game as much as I possibly can. If that involves moving around, I’m gonna do it”.
Truth be told, the Steelers are behind the trend on this matter. Many of the league’s top pass rushers will move from one side to the other, some more freely than others. While he’s done it more in the past, Myles Garrett, for example, has taken 25 of his 144 pass-rush snaps on the left side. Micah Parsons has 98 rushes on the left and 68 on the right. Khalil Mack has 108 on the right and 88 on the left. You get the idea.
The only real question I have is why the Steelers did not do this sooner. Offenses have been throwing everything and the kitchen sink at Watt for years now. There are some pretty funny images of him trying to work through three offensive linemen—sometimes successfully.
“There’s definitely a lot of bodies in my way in the run game, in the pass game, but it’s nothing I’m not used to at this point”, said of the attention that he gets. If making him less of a stationary target from a location standpoint can help in any way, then they might as well make use of it.
