The Pittsburgh Steelers added a lot of new pieces this offseason, notably ILB Patrick Queen, to help their defense. While adding new pieces can slow you down initially, they have been able to win while integrating the recent additions. That can only be encouraging, especially as those players display greater comfort moving forward.
Perhaps we started to see that yesterday with Queen, who had his most complete game against the Steelers’ toughest opponent so far, the Los Angeles Chargers. He finished the contest with a team-high eight tackles, which is more than he had in the first two weeks. And former Steelers DL Chris Hoke was pumped up to talk about it after criticizing him a week ago.
“Last week I talked about Patrick Queen and how he needed to step up”, he said Sunday on the KDKA Steelers Extra Point show. “The Steelers paid a lot of money for him to come here. This is the kind of football player they brought [in]. He was physical, he set the tone from the very first play. If you remember, he came off, scraped through the right side of the line of scrimmage, and lit up J.K. Dobbins. And he sent a message from the first play. That’s the kind of football player the Steelers need in the middle of the field”.
Patrick Queen and Donte Jackson—another 2024 addition—split the first tackle of the game. They stopped Dobbins, Queen’s former Ravens teammate, for just a two-yard gain, after averaging 9.9 yards per rush in his first two games.
In fact, of his eight tackles, five of them were tackles of J.K. Dobbins, four of them run stops. I’m sure he and Queen had a nice little chat about that after the game, both in new environments now. The Ravens drafted Queen in the first round in 2020, Dobbins in the second that year. They had played their whole NFL careers together prior to this season, so saw each other plenty in practice.
Now Patrick Queen has five tackles against Dobbins, and five wins. Dobbins finished the game with just 44 rushing yards on 15 attempts with a long of 13, a far cry from his first two games. He rushed for 131 yards in the opener on 17 attempts, then 135 on 10 carries. He led the NFL in rushing yards, yards per carry, and longest rush. Patrick Queen just made him look a lot less efficient.
And as Hoke points out, that is what the Steelers needed him to be. That is why they gave him a three-year, $41 million contract. Queen is the type of inside linebacker the Steelers have been missing for years. They are still waiting for more impact plays (he had another shot at an interception Sunday), but he is getting more comfortable week by week, and you can tell.
