The Pittsburgh Steelers face the team Arthur Smith spent the previous three seasons coaching, the Atlanta Falcons. Even though he served as head coach during that time, Mike Tomlin knows that only tells you so much.
After all, the Falcons are already very different from a year ago. They now have Raheem Morris as head coach, and he turned over the coaching staff. The quarterback room is rebuilt, with Kirk Cousins brought in and Michael Penix Jr. in development. So how much can the Steelers really glean from Smith about his former team?
“Nothing out of the ordinary, to be honest with you”, Tomlin said on Tuesday when asked about Smith’s insights. “Obviously, he has an understanding of a lot of their personnel. Everybody in the National Football League has personnel departments. It’s our business to understand their personnel. I don’t know that we’ve had any earth-shattering information provided in that regard”.
As Tomlin talked about earlier in the press conference, the Falcons do have a trio of high-pedigree skill position players. WR Drake London, TE Kyle Pitts, and RB Bijan Robinson are all former top-10 picks, with one thing in common. Arthur Smith drafted them all, so he certainly knows them well.
As a rookie in 2021, Pitts recorded 68 catches for 1,026 yards. London has 1,771 receiving yards through his first two seasons, while Robinson recorded 1,463 yards from scrimmage as a rookie. Clearly, Arthur Smith saw something in them that he translated to the field. While some criticized his ability to maximize his blue-chip players, there’s no question he knows them.
But so do all of the Falcons’ opponents, at this point—that’s what a scouting report tells you. Here at Steelers Depot, we do our own scouting reporters for every opponent, as all the tape is publicly available. Believe it or not, but Arthur Smith doesn’t actually give us any inside information.
Sure, Smith spent three years in that organization, but there is a reason that the Falcons fired him. They wanted to change things, and to change things that they could not with him as head coach. So of course things are different—that’s how it works when you change head coaches.
In some ways, the Falcons might have more insight than the Steelers do, as Arthur Smith is their known commodity. He hasn’t changed; he is simply running a different offense. And he is even doing it with some of the same players, who know him well, in Scotty Miller, MyCole Pruitt, Van Jefferson, and Cordarrelle Patterson, all of whom he coached in Atlanta and who are now in Pittsburgh.
