The Pittsburgh Steelers have one of the best defenses in the league. They have the talent to be the undisputed top defense, but there have been some inexplicable issues over the first eight games that need to be cleaned up for them to take the next step. The run defense occasionally breaking down for an entire game is near the top of the list of bugaboos that threaten to derail the team’s success.
Cameron Heyward knows it must improve and talked about it on his Not Just Football podcast this morning.
“I’m not happy about that. Going into the game, I thought we were doing a good job stopping the run. You watch that game, yards after contact, you give props to them, but man we gotta wrap up. We gotta tackle,” Heyward said. “Especially giving up explosion runs, that’s not allowed. And you know multiple teams are gonna try and duplicate that. They’re gonna go back to that formula and see if they have more success with it.”
The Steelers’ defense has been very hard to move the ball and score on this season, so any team that puts together a game plan will start with watching the Indianapolis Colts’ success in the first quarter, the Dallas Cowboys’ success running the ball, and the New York Giants’ success running the ball. The defensive line and front seven in general are far too good to be allowing a 145-yard rusher, especially against a team that hasn’t been running the ball well.
It was a similar story against the Cowboys, though not quite as bad. They were one of the worst rushing teams in the league and still found success.
I don’t want to make it out like they have been bad all year. The Steelers still have the league’s fourth-best run defense, allowing just 90.5 yards per game, but there have been multiple games where it didn’t look very good.
You can view a missed tackle report from the Giants game by our Josh Carney for a look at what went wrong.
“We gotta get off blocks. I don’t think we did a good job of getting off blocks and then just tackling,” Heyward said. “I think our tackling struggled at some points and it gave up seven points when we needed to keep them off the scoreboard.”
The Steelers will not be able to have these issues against teams like the Washington Commanders, Philadelphia Eagles, and Baltimore Ravens coming up on the schedule. Or even the Cleveland Browns with Nick Chubb back in the equation. Those are six of their remaining nine games. The Ravens, Eagles and Commanders are currently the first-, second-, and third-best rushing offenses in the league.
If they aren’t wrapping up, getting off blocks, and gang tackling guys like Derrick Henry, they could be in for some rough games.
