Steelers Now
PITTSBURGH — In many ways, the Pittsburgh Steelers and New York Jets are familiar with one another leading up to their Week 1 game at MetLife Stadium on Sunday. Aaron Rodgers was the Jets’ starting quarterback the last two season. Defensive backs Brandin Echols and Chuck Clark made the same transition. Justin Fields, who started six games for the Steelers last year, went the other way.
The members of the teams that did not swap sides since then will certainly remember the matchup between the teams at Acrisure Stadium last fall.
But there’s a big piece of the puzzle that has changed, and the uncertainty provided by that change could make the Jets a potential stumbling block for the Steelers.
The Jets will start the 2025 season with an entirely new coaching staff, led by former Detroit Lions defensive coordinator Aaron Glenn. Glenn brought Tanner Engstrand, who was a position coach with the Lions, to New York and made him a first-time NFL coordinator. The new-ness of the coaching staff will make the Jets tough to prepare for.
Week 1 is always tough around the NFL from a coaching perspective. There’s little tape on how new additions will change the personality of a team, compared to the way they played last season.
That uncertainty gets ratcheted up a big notch when it comes with new coaches and coordinators. How much of what they were doing with the Detroit Lions will Glenn and Engstrand bring to New York, and how much of it will be new?
How much of what Glenn did in Detroit will be blended with what defensive coordinator Steve Wilks has previously done with the San Francisco 49ers, Carolina Panthers and Arizona Cardinals?
There’s no real way for the Steelers to know.
“Certainly in Week 1, there are some challenges when you’re speculating schematic personality, division of labor, agenda if you will,” Tomlin said. “I think it gets magnified sometimes when you have a new staff, particularly a new staff with first-time coordinators like on the offensive side of the ball for them.
“But to be quite honest, if you’ve been in this business any length of time, it’s almost kind of commonplace this time of year. We were very much in the same circumstance 12 months ago.”
Last season, the Steelers went on the road in Week 1, facing the Atlanta Falcons, who had a new head coach in Raheem Morris. They came away with a victory. That time around, the Steelers had two such games to start the season, with a new staff in Atlanta followed by another road trip to visit a new staff in Denver in Week 2. They went 2-0, in victories that turned out to be better than they looked in September.
The Falcons finished a middling 8-9, but upset the eventual Super Bowl champs, the Philadelphia Eagles, the very next week. Denver went 10-7, returning to the playoffs under Sean Payton.
By the end of the Steelers’ season, with a late-year...
