An argument can very easily be made that it was not WR Diontae Johnson’s place to call out the Pittsburgh Steelers’ “leaking” defense as his first reaction to the question of what is going wrong. After all, the offense hasn’t scored more than 18 points in the past five games and has only scored more than 20 points all of three times this year.
But the thing is, he’s not wrong. Here’s the problem: the Steelers have no margin for error. Everybody knows that. And everybody knew that the pressure would be on the defense. It has bent quite a bit all season but hadn’t been breaking.
They quite possibly may be broken now. They’ve given up three offensive touchdowns in three consecutive games and 75 points in total. They had not done that in over a year and a half, between Weeks Three and Five of the 2022 season. Before that, it hadn’t happened since the 2020 season.
While it tends to happen once in most years, the thing is, the Steelers used to have an offense capable of winning those games. They have lost their last 14 games when giving up three-plus touchdowns, the last victory being a 29-27 win over the Chicago Bears in November 2021. Ben Roethlisberger threw two touchdown passes to Pat Freiermuth and Najee Harris ran for another while Chris Boswell hit on a trio of field goals.
But they used to win those games. While the record is never going to be great when you give up three or more touchdowns, they were a respectable 15-17-1 during the 2014-2018 seasons. They won three such games in a row in 2018, though they were 3-5-1 overall under those circumstances that year.
But that was a team that could give up three-plus touchdowns on a regular basis and still finish the season 9-6-1. They ranked 16th in scoring defense that year. This year, they’ve begun to slide, currently down to eighth after their recent struggles.
Head coach Mike Tomlin has had a rather annoying tendency this year to spare the offense from a great deal of criticism, but the fact is the past three games, the defense has not gotten the job done. There is no excuse for allowing teams to score 20-plus points under these circumstances.
And it’s not as though there were many gimmes in there. The Indianapolis Colts found the end zone on two 75-yard drives. The other did come after the Steelers lost a fumble inside their own 20, but the quick-change defense needs to hold that to a field goal, which DL Cameron Heyward talked about recently.
The New England Patriots likewise had one drive that spanned just 11 yards to find the end zone following a turnover, and, again, that’s on the quick-change defense for not holding them to a field goal. But the other two touchdown drives spanned 75 and 59 yards. The Cardinals scored on drives of 21 and 33 yards, but also a 99-yard drive, and that’s the one that got them going.
That’s five touchdowns allowed on drives of 59-plus yards in the past three games. That’s a problem. So are the numerous drives that have begun in Steelers territory, and that’s a shared problem. But that doesn’t stop the fact that the defense is leaking. And they can’t win another game this year if they don’t fix that. Not when they can’t put up 20 points.
