The Pittsburgh Steelers started the season with one of the best defenses in the league—at least statistically. Since the bye week, though, and really, over the past month and a half, the worm has turned. In reality, they have more often been one of the worst defenses—and nobody is sure why. They know what is happening, sometimes, but they don’t know the cause.
“I don’t have the answers, clearly. If I had the answers, I would’ve done something differently this week. I feel like we had a good week of prep”, T.J. Watt said via the Steelers’ website. “I feel like we had a physical practice week and it didn’t correlate”.
We heard similar sentiments from many Steelers players leading up to yesterday’s game. They all felt things were improving, particularly on defense, and that they were having a good week. But they also thought they were having good weeks during their four-game losing streak. How can they practice so well yet play poorly during games?
Perhaps most galling is that the Steelers seem to feel they solved their biggest problem. Steelers S DeShon Elliott, for example, said that they communicated well in this game. Everything else, however, seemed to go wrong—and unsurprisingly, he had no answers. Neither did Cameron Heyward, who played his heart out this year and earned first-team All-Pro honors.
“I don’t know. I’ll be looking at it all offseason, trying to figure it out”, Heyward said via the Steelers’ website when asked what went wrong since December. “We’ve got a lot of great guys in there. The technique is there. I just don’t think we got off enough blocks, made enough splash plays, or bought ourselves enough real estate to get to a point where we could do what we wanted”.
Asked why they weren’t getting off blocks, the Steelers captain repeated that he didn’t know. “I wish I could have some bigger answer for you. But too many times [Derrick Henry]’s running north and south, and we’re running east to west. You like to think we have a scheme where we bounce a guy out to the edge, and we didn’t do that”.
While the Steelers still have to review the film from the loss to the Ravens to dissect exactly what happened, this lack of knowledge about what went wrong is concerning. You can hardly make in-game adjustments if you don’t know what is causing your problems, can you?
The Steelers have many good players on defense, on all three levels. There may be debate about how good one guy is or another, but the unit has talent. The problem is that talent is struggling to play together as a unit.
A core part of the problem is the weakness along the defensive line behind Heyward and Keeanu Benton. They have allowed far too many yards before contact, and last night may have been the worst. After all, the Ravens rushed for 300 yards against them, mostly from Derrick Henry. And most of that through open holes. That is hardly Steelers football—but none of the Steelers know why they couldn’t get back to it again.
