Saunders: With or Without Tomlin, Steelers Must Fix Faulty Defensive Coaching
It does not appear that the Pittsburgh Steelers will be moving on from head coach Mike Tomlin after another disappointing season.
ESPN NFL insider Adam Schefter reported on Sunday morning that the Steelers have no interest in moving on from Tomlin, and Gerry Dulac of the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette reported on Sunday afternoon that the team does not plan to do so.
It’s possible that Tomlin himself could male the decision to step down, but from all appearances, it seems likely that he’ll be back for his 19th season as Steelers head coach in 2025.
So what to make of that decision? The end result, another first-round playoff exit, is not where the Steelers want to be. It’s also a lot farther than most rational analysts thought this team could get.
The Steelers were underdogs to even make the playoffs before the season, and their consensus season win total of 8.5 was passed early in the season. Yes, the Steelers finished on a five-game slide, but four of those five games were against teams still playing in the second round of the postseason, and three of them were on the road.
The Steelers were clearly a good team in 2024. The fact that four of those five losses were by double digits also suggests that they were not that close to being a great team.
On the whole, the Steelers probably out-played their personnel this season, hence the well-over Vegas win total. But looking more granularly, things get a bit messy.
These Steelers were panned before the season mostly because of big questions about the team’s offense. Arthur Smith had been a failure as a head coach with the Atlanta Falcons. Russell Wilson was entering his 36-year-old season, coming off being cut by Denver and paid the NFL’s largest-ever parting gift. There was an obvious dearth of talent at the wide receiver position. The offensive line was young and unproven.
It seemed unlikely that the Steelers would have even an average offense. They ended up being exactly average, finishing 16th in scoring. The underlying numbers weren’t as pretty, with Smith’s unit ending up 23rd in yards and tied for 25th in yards per play, but they scored more than they probably should have been expected to.
Smith was in his first season as the Steelers’ offensive coordinator, new to the team and to his players. There was also a lot of other new things happening on the offense, season-ending injuries to three offensive linemen, and Wilson missed the first six games of the season.
Smith was far from perfect in his first season as the Steelers’ offensive coordinator, but he almost certainly did enough to earn a second season. The fact that he’s getting at least two bona fide NFL head coaching interviews this week should tell you what the league thinks about his performances.
On defense, it’s a very different story. The Steelers took one of the league’s best and most expensive defenses and added to it, piling Patrick Queen, DeShon Elliott, Payton Wilson, Cam Sutton and Donte Jackson onto an already fairly loaded unit.
Instead, the Steelers defense got worse, falling from sixth to eighth in scoring. During the team’s five-game slide at the end of the season, they averaged 27.4 points per game against. Taken over the course of the season, that number would’ve been the second-worst in the league.
In Week 16, the Ravens rushed for 220 yards and Derrick Henry went off for 162 of them. Three weeks later, the Ravens rushed for 299 and Henry had 186. There did not appear to be any kind of tactical adjustment for strategic shift for the Steelers. They just lined up and were badly beaten for the second time in a row.
The lack of a tactical answer had some players questioning the game plan after the loss.
“It’s been a pretty rough last month of football for the Pittsburgh Steelers, especially defensively,” outside linebacker T.J. Watt summarized.
When asked about what the team needs to do to be better in future seasons, he said, “that’s above my pay grade.”
Former NFL head coach and defensive coordinator Rex Ryan ripped the Steelers’ defesnive game play against the Ravens.
“Pittsburgh, though, schematically, has to change,” Ryan said. “They’ve gotta change. You can’t let him run zone-read all over the place.”
The Steelers lost to the Ravens — twice — because they could not stop Henry. But it was so much more than that. Baltimore humiliated the Steelers run defense. They scored on a drive with 13 straight running plays. After the Steelers offense battled and fought to finally make it a game, Baltimore scored to get the touchdown back in just four plays.
The final 14-point margin between the Steelers and the Ravens was only because John Harbaugh’s crew took their foot off the gas.
It’s clear that the Steelers defense under-achieved in 2024. Tomlin bears a lot of responsibility for the way that unit looks, how it plays, and even how it’s been constructed.
Sure, the Steelers could move on from defensive coordinator Teryl Austin after three seasons. But how much would that really change when it comes to the Steelers’ defense?
In his immediate postgame comments, Tomlin seemed to place some of the blame for the poor defensive effort on the Steelers offense.
“In combination with our ineffectiveness on offense, when we are on the grass like that, particularly against a group and a unit like that, with a guy like [Lamar Jackson], it could look the way it looked,” Tomlin said.
The Steelers’ offense is a big-picture problem that does not have a quick solution. They lack talent at quarterback, the game’s most important position, and with a draft slot at No. 21 overall in a quarterback-poor selection pool, they almost certainly won’t be finding their next franchise player at that spot this offseason. The problems at wide receiver and along the offensive line will have to be dealt with incrementally
The defense is another story. On paper, it’s the most talented unit in the league. It turned out to be not anywhere near that good. The coaching must change, and Teryl Austin’s position, despite Tomlin’s level of involvement in the defense, looks shaky.
If the coaching personnel does not change, then Tomlin must use this offseason to correct the coaching mistakes of 2024 and figure out a way forward that returns that unit to dominance in 2025.
Aaron Becker provided reporting from Baltimore.
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