Steelers Now
The lasting image of the end of the Pittsburgh Steelers 2024 season is not one that sits well with head coach Mike Tomlin. Last year’s Steelers started the season strong, and entered December in position to make noise in the playoffs.
A late-season skid, helped along by one of the toughest December schedules ever, instead gave the Steelers a more-difficult than expected playoff opponent: the Baltimore Ravens. While the Steelers and Ravens had split their two games during the 2024 regular season, the game in Baltimore in December provided quite the blueprint for the Ravens to follow in the rubber match, with star running back Derrick Henry gashing the Steelers for 162 yards.
In the playoffs, he did it again. Only worse. On Jan 11, the Ravens lit up the Steelers run defense to the tune of 299 yards. Henry led the way with 186 of them. It was one of the most embarrassing defensive performances in Steelers playoff history.
Two weeks later, Steelers head coach Mike Tomlin was on the sidelines as the 2025 Senior Bowl in Mobile, Alabama, scouting players for the 2025 NFL Draft. And from the very beginning, it was clear that Tomlin was focused on upgrading his defensive line.
At what point after that Ravens loss did Tomlin determine they needed to be exceptionally aggressive in building the trenches?
“I doubt that I had even gotten in the shower yet,” Tomlin said to NFL Network on Saturday.
Henry, who the Ravens acquired in free agency last year, had his best games against the Steelers last season. After being held in check in a loss to Pittsburgh, the Ravens game planned to make Henry the thorn in the Steelers’ side.
Henry gashed the Steelers for 162 rushing yards in a win over their divisional foe–by all accounts, his dominant game against Pittsburgh. Three weeks later after winning the division, the Ravens gave the Steelers’ defense another warm welcome–racking up nearly 300 yards on the ground alone.
Tomlin’s defenses have made Lamar Jackson look human when the ground game was minimal. Once the Ravens overcame that hurdle, Jackson showed Pittsburgh why he is an elite quarterback.
When looking ahead to the 2025 season, and the team’s needs for adding talent this offseason, the Steelers then turned to their defensive line as the tip of the spear in stopping Henry. Not only was it part of the unit that was gashed by the Baltimore ground game, it was also a unit overdue for investment. Before drafting Derrick Harmon in the first round on Thursday night, the last time the Steelers used a first-round pick on a defensive lineman was on aging legend Cam Heyward. The team released Larry Ogunjobi earlier this offseason in a salary-cap related move that also created a starting vacancy that the team needed to fill right away. The big-picture and immediate needs converged to create what Tomlin called “extreme urgency” at the position.
“There’s no substitute for young talent,” he said. “You don’t have...
