Nose tackle is going the way of the Dodo bird. Or at least the fullback. While Mike Tomlin was referencing a global and frankly, obvious football thought, his comments won’t help the odds of someone like Michigan’s Kenneth Grant landing in Pittsburgh at No. 21 overall.
Asked about the value of a nose tackle in a sub-package heavy world, Tomlin acknowledged the position is harder to get on the field.
“I think the nose is a disappearing animal the way that the fullback is a disappearing animal in our game,” Tomlin told reporters Tuesday during his annual pre-draft conference as shared on the team’s YouTube channel.
The facts certainly support Tomlin’s stance. Our defensive charting showed a sharp decrease in Pittsburgh’s base 3-4 usage even from 2023 to 2024. In 2023, the team used its base defense 40.3 percent of the time. In 2024, the Steelers deployed it only 26.7 percent of the time, 266 total snaps. It served as their lowest percentage in the decade we’ve been charting the Steelers’ defense. Even factoring in the occasional personnel wrinkle like their 3-5 groupings, the Steelers played with two defensive linemen the overwhelming majority of the time last season.
That could make it harder to justify drafting a nose tackle like Michigan’s Kenneth Grant in the first round. Though light on his feet and highly athletic relative to his 331-pound frame, he may struggle to see enough snaps to provide good ROI for a first-round pick.
Of course, Tomlin could’ve been playing some gamesmanship with his comments, too. Grant is more than just a run stuffer and could rotate in on sub-packages behind Cam Heyward and Keeanu Benton. And Pittsburgh certainly needs to improve its run defense after getting chewed up for 299 yards in its Wild Card loss to the Baltimore Ravens, a franchise prideful on stopping the run the last 50 years. And drafting Grant could kick out Benton to play defensive end, solving two problems with one pick.
Whether or not the team addresses its defensive line and if so, with whom, are two of the many questions about the Steelers’ draft entering the final two days before the picks start rolling in.
