Steelers Now
The Pittsburgh Steelers are a team that is entering the 2025 season trying to do two things at the same time.
There are two major ideas that have been governing the way the team has operated there last few years, and while both of those ideas have the same goal, they get there in very different ways.
They are not necessarily exclusionary. It’s possible that both could succeed. It’s equally possible that both could fail. It’s also very possible that 2025 is the season that the correct path to the future is fully revealed once and for all.
The first thing the Steelers are trying to do is win with their defense — a task that Steelers head coach Mike Tomlin has been undertaking ever since the elbow of his franchise quarterback exploded in 2019.
Led by Minkah Fitzpatrick, T.J. Watt and Cam Heyward, the Steelers have had an unquestionably great defense over that time. In 2019, right after Roethlisberger’s injury, the team made a hard choice. They traded a future first-round pick to the Miami Dolphins for Fitzpatrick, solidifying a path forward that wasn’t being undertaken by many in the NFL at that time: winning with a dominant defense.
Since then, that unit has largely fit that bill. The Steelers finished fifth in scoring defense in 2019, dragging a Mason Rudolph and Duck Hodges-led offense to a .500 record. In 2020, they were even better, finishing third. Only in 2021, amid Watt’s record-breaking sack performance, did the defense fail to finish inside the top 10 in scoring.
But the Steelers also have notoriously failed to win a playoff game with this plan, and the playoff results have not been kind to the team’s defense. In 2020 — aided by five turnovers from the offense — they gave up 48 points in a home loss to the Cleveland Browns. In 2021, despite pitching a shutout in the first quarter and scoring a touchdown of their own in the second, the Steelers defense eventually yielded 42 points to Patrick Mahomes and the Kansas City Chiefs.
In 2023, with Watt sidelined with an injury, they gave up 39 points to the Buffalo Bills, and last year, it was only 28 points but an emasculating 299 yards on the ground from the Baltimore Ravens that ended the Steelers’ season.
In those four playoff losses, the Steelers defense have averaged 39.25 points against. More critically, that elevated rate of scoring has also come with next to no splash contributions that could help the offense, with the defense averaging 1.5 sacks per game and 0.5 turnovers per game.
This offseason, after that humiliating performance against the Ravens, the Steelers pushed even more chips in on their pursuit of this path to victory. They re-signed Watt to a three-year, $123 million contract extension, traded Fitzpatrick for All-Pro cornerback Jalen Ramsey and signed free agent cornerback Darius Slay from the Super Bowl champion Philadelphia Eagles. That came after signing Heyward to an extension and making linebacker Patrick...
