Things are not going well in Pittsburgh, particularly on the defensive side of the football.
Having now lost three straight games in rather embarrassing fashion, the Steelers are in a serious free fall late in the season, and their play on the defensive side of the football has been rather concerning.
Within the three-game losing streak, the Steelers have not had an answer for the passing game from the Philadelphia Eagles and the Kansas City Chiefs, and the run game against the Baltimore Ravens.
The performance on Christmas Day against the Chiefs was rather concerning as the quick passing game carved up the Steelers, and Pittsburgh’s defense had a number of miscommunications leaving guys wide open in the secondary. After the loss to the Chiefs, some key defensive players like Cameron Heyward, Patrick Queen and DeShon Elliott were critical of the mistakes and the communication issues, with Elliott hitting the hardest, stating that guys need to do their “fricking jobs” and more.
Former Steelers safety and ESPN analyst Ryan Clark said Elliott was talking crazy publicly and that Elliott’s postgame comments are a sign of the culture having changed in Pittsburgh.
“What the hell is going on in Pittsburgh? What happens here? DeShon Elliot is sitting up there with the two-five on his hat just talking crazy,” Clark said Friday on First Take, according to video via ESPN. “You know, when you have these teams and you start to put different pieces on them, right? When you go, when you get a DeShon Elliott, who’s a free agent, you bring in Donte Jackson, who’s a free agent, and you’re starting to put some of these pieces together to try to build a team, that’s different for Pittsburgh. What Omar Khan, the general manager has done this year, they never did. Right? When they brought in James Farrior as a free agent from the New York Jets, it was a big deal that he became one of the legendary Steelers because that’s not what the Steelers do. They draft you and they develop you. Now you think about bringing in myself, Jeff Hartings, all of these things all go down as like these big, huge free agent signings because of what they turned into.
“This team is different. Now, there aren’t a lot of these homegrown and home-raised Steelers that were drafted here that understand the culture, that know it’s supposed to be done one way, right? Because what used to happen when we were having these sorts of things is everybody pointed at themselves, right?”
In the past, as Clark pointed out, the Steelers weren’t all that aggressive in free agency. Instead, they’d draft and develop, retain their own guys and add around the fringes when necessary. Clark was one of those fringe additions who turned into quite a piece.
But after a few years struggling to draft, the Steelers needed to be aggressive in free agency and on the trade market, adding guys like Elliott, Queen, Donte Jackson, and more to the roster. In turn, Clark seems to think that the Steeler Way has been lost a bit because these new faces aren’t stepping into a locker room with a lot of homegrown guys.
Which then leads to postgame moments like what we’ve seen from Elliott and Queen in recent weeks.
Clark speaks from experience that in the past if bad games happened, the comments would all be in lockstep to the media with players searching inward, putting the blame on themselves through the media. Then behind closed doors business would be handled as a team.
That’s not happening right now, and it has Clark a bit concerned.
“When you ask DeShon Elliott a question and you say, ‘Hey man, what could be better?’ You know what you say? ‘I gotta play better. Yeah, I gotta make this tackle. I gotta make this hit. I gotta communicate better. Now we’re getting to the room and we lock them doors,'” Clark said of how Elliott should have handled the postgame situation. “We could throw hands if we got to, right? Because we’re gonna find a way to win.
“And even Cam Heyward, because what happens is when you say 10 guys do their job, but one doesn’t, that ain’t good enough. You know what my next question is who? And so, what you can’t do is when you’re losing, you can’t let folks into your house like that. Like, if you got a problem with your significant other, you got a problem with your, with your significant others, we might knock this house down, but when we walk outside, we gonna act right. I feel like the Pittsburgh Steelers aren’t keeping family business, family business. But that’s what losing does.”
That certainly is what losing does in professional sports. When things are going badly like they are for the Steelers right now, things really start to snowball and spiral out of control. And when that happens, if the culture isn’t tight, there can be a lot of bickering and in-fighting, pointing fingers and more, rather than keeping things in-house, getting back to work and working together toward a solution.
Hopefully the mini-bye week the Steelers are now on will do them some good, giving them a chance to get away from football for a few days, regroup and come back together to work toward beating the Bengals in Week 18 to enter the playoffs on a positive note.
If not, things could go from bad to worse, and nobody wants to see that.
