Steelers Now
CINCINNATI — The Pittsburgh Steelers spent their 2025 offseason revamping their defense, keeping it the league’s most-expensive unit while attempting to tailor its talents to do things it failed to do down the stretch run of the 2024 season: stop the Baltimore Ravens on the ground and slow down the Cincinnati Bengals through the air.
To deal with the latter goal, the Steelers shipped out All-Pro safety Minkah Fitzpatrick, replacing him with a collection of journeymen at that position, and instead reallocated those resources to the cornerback position, where the team spent $10 million in free agency on Darius Slay, and traded Fitzpatrick for Jalen Ramsey to go along with Joey Porter Jr. and give the team three starting caliber cornerback.
It represented a wholesale shift in approach compared to the last few years, when the Steelers had largely ignored the slot cornerback position and spent more at safety than almost anyone else in the league.
The idea was that investing more in cover corners would allow the Steelers to face a team like the Bengals, with multiple high-end receiving threats, and still be able to play whatever kind of defense they wanted against them.
The Steelers over the last few years, with players like Patrick Peterson and Donte Jackson in the secondary, were limited to mostly playing zone coverage against the likes of Ja’Marr Chase, Tee Higgins and company.
In Thursday’s loss in Cincinnati, they couldn’t cover anyone. They tried to go man-to-man, as was the plan. Porter was flagged for DPI. Ramsey was beaten 1-on-1. The Steelers tried to switch off who was covering which man. They tried to zone. They tried many different zones: Cover 3, Cover 2, quarters. They tried two-man — a combination of man and zone.
Tomlin and Teryl Austin rolled through the rolodex of defensive coverages with a dizzying speed, trying over a dozen combination. Absolutely nothing worked. The Steelers couldn’t cover routinely either Chase or Higgins, at any point throughout the entire game.
The dominant narrative on social media among Steelers fans after the game was that Tomlin and Austin wouldn’t or couldn’t make necessary adjustments, or that they weren’t prepared for what Cincinnati did. Nothing could be further from the truth, and that’s so much worse. Being unprepared or unwilling to change are relatively easy issues to fix. What the Steelers are dealing with is much more deep-seated.
“We double teamed (Chase) some, we double teamed (Higgins) some, had some mixes when required,” Tomlin said. “They’ve got depth of talent. Just like the one play (Iosivas) made down the middle, we were doubling (Chase and Higgins), and so they were one-on-one in that circumstance. There’s many ways you can analyze it, but the bottom line is they made more plays than we did.”
Furthermore, their focus on trying to stop those two opened up other gaping holes in their defense. They blitzed, and that didn’t routinely work. It also gave up big plays in the running game — by far the...
