There has been a lot of criticism levied against the Pittsburgh Steelers for their moves this offseason. They waited, waited, and waited some more for Aaron Rodgers before the future Hall of Famer finally signed a one year deal to come play in Pittsburgh. They traded away their best receiver (George Pickens) while also trading for a quality receiver (D.K. Metcalf). Pickens may have been a locker room issue but it still seemed odd to move off of one physically talented receiver and then add another.
But its on defense where things get a little crazy, at least to the casual observer. The Steelers added veteran CB Darius Slay this offseason through free agency. A solid move, nothing wrong with that. But then they traded veteran safety Minkah Fitzpatrick to the Miami Dolphins in a package that landed Pittsburgh veteran corner Jalen Ramsey (as well as TE Jonnu Smith).
At this point, it looked a little strange. On top of the WR position, bringing in Rodgers for a 1 year flier, now they were swapping veteran DBs? To most who follow Pittsburgh it seemed a little too much like shuffling deck chairs on the sinking Titanic for comfort.
Fortunately for Steelers fans, there does appear to be a method to the madness. According to Pro Football Focus (PFF) the Steelers were the best pass rushing team in football in 2024. Not even the Super Bowl Champion Philadelphia Eagles were as good as Pittsburgh in this department. The issue for Pittsburgh however, was the massive discrepancy between the Pass Rush grade and the Coverage grade. The Steelers Coverage grade was 33 points lower than their pass rush grade, again according to PFF. This is almost impossible to imagine. Great pass rushes help out the secondary. The Steelers pass rush was easily good enough for the secondary to perform at a high level. But they didn’t.
So Omar Kahn (general manager of the Steelers) set out to address this problem. He made the decision that the issue was at the cornerback position. The Steelers’ corners, in Khan’s estimation, were not good enough in 2024. So he went out and acquired veterans that he knew could come in and perform at least at some baseline level of performance. He clearly didn’t want young corners through the draft. Only veterans who had some level of past performance would do. To that end, Khan has bet that Slay and Ramsey will improve the coverage grade enough to remove the vast chunk of that 33 point discrepancy. And he believes that (along with the Rodgers signing), may make the Steelers a title team in 2025.
OK, but is Khan crazy? Does the discrepancy between pass rush and coverage performance actually matter? Well in an interesting turn of events, it turns out it does. A lot. Check out the graph below:
What jumps out right away is that the two Super Bowl teams from last season both had positive results (their Coverage grade was better than their Pass Rush grade). You’ll also notice that some of the worst teams in football had very negative results. The clearest interpretation of the data is this: championship caliber teams maximize their pass rushing.
Obviously there isn’t a perfect correlation between winning and what the data says, but its strong enough to show that the Steelers clearly had a problem. To be frank, anytime you are worse than the Cleveland Browns in a statistic there are clearly major issues. Adding Ramsey and Slay at least gives the Steelers a chance to get closer to a neutral score. It certainly doesn’t guarantee it, but they clearly weren’t going to make a deep postseason run until this was addressed. And based on the Steelers other moves (Rodgers, Metcalf) the Steelers are expecting 2025 to be an opportunity make an extended playoff push.
The Steelers and Omar Khan took a lot of criticism for their offseason moves and it came to a head with decision to trade away safety Minkah Fitzpatrick and to acquire Jalen Ramsey. And while this move certainly looked odd, a deeper analysis reveals that Pittsburgh was much more calculated than what was visible at surface level. Time will tell if this move works out but credit should be given where its due. The Steelers actually made a really clever and smart move here in their attempt to go “all-in” in 2025.
