Pittsburgh Steelers OLB T.J. Watt last played a snap on the defensive right edge in Week 16 of the 2021 season prior to last week’s win over the Los Angeles Rams. He logged 21 snaps on the right side that season. He got three in the last game this year. Defensive coordinator Teryl Austin indicated we should expect to see him get more of that moving forward.
“I think we wanted to try to move T.J. because, as you guys know, he gets chipped, double-teamed, all kinds of things every play”, he told reporters yesterday, via transcript provided by the team’s media department. “It was a little bit of a us trying to move him around, get him in an advantageous position”.
It’s all in an effort, he said, to try to neutralize some of the ways in which opposing offenses try to stop Watt. Having another very good outside linebacker on the other side in Alex Highsmith is not enough. So the Steelers want to maximize his opportunities even further, including making him more ambidextrous the way many other top rushers are.
One thing is for sure, and that is every one of their opponents is going to have a game plan in place to try to neutralize Watt in some way, shape, or form. Up to this point, the Steelers haven’t done a great deal schematically to counter that, but that seems to be changing.
“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”, Austin said, “it” being the inevitability of offenses double- and tripling-teaming him and throwing all kinds of chips and obstacles in his way to slow him down. If making it less obvious what side he’s going to be on makes that a little bit more difficult, it’s worth doing.
“We’re trying to move him around and find some different things and different ways for him to rush. He moves wide, because if he stays there tight the guy has an outside angle to chip him down and that limits his effectiveness as a rusher, so it’s our job to try to get him in the best positions.
So, we’ll do that, whether it’s scheme on that side, moving him around, whatever it takes”.
Most fans likely haven’t forgotten this, but Watt actually was the team’s right outside linebacker during his rookie season in 2017. The Steelers moved him the next year and he has hardly played on that side again since. In fact, he played more snaps on the left side as a rookie than he has played on the right side in any season since then.
All agree that Watt is more suited to rushing off the left side, where he’s more comfortable, but you can still have a dominant side while rushing off both ends. Guys like Micah Parsons, Maxx Crosby, Myles Garrett, Nick Bosa, and Khalil Mack all rush off of both edges with varying degrees of regularity. Why not decrease the predictability of your best player? It only seems to make sense.
