Pittsburgh Steelers Q&A with Neal Coolong

With the league in sort of a dead period during the summer, I decided to send out some questions to Neal Coolong. Neal currently writes for Steelers Wire and was the former editor of the Steelers SB Nation blog Behind the Steel Curtain.

Discuss in the BSL Forums here

1) In 2014, the Steelers led the league in passing DVOA, beating out Rodgers, Manning, and Brady led teams. It was also the highest passing DVOA of Ben Roethlisberger’s career. How were the Steelers able to create such an effective passing offense? And will they be able to replicate it next year?

The Steelers’ biggest enemy in recent years hasn’t been a lack of talent as much as it’s been a lack of continuity. Their running back position was deplorable in 2011-12, and the offensive line was a big part of their lack of running ability. That, in turn, made them largely one-dimensional, and it wasn’t very hard to prepare a defense to counter them.

The change this season was a combination of experience and health. They had the same five starters as they had in Week 1 in nearly every game, and never more than two of them out at a time. Protection improved, and with it, the emergence of Le’Veon Bell – who went from reasonably decent to superstar from 2013 to 2014. The Steelers’ offense became dynamic, and with an underrated quarterback in terms of intelligence, Ben Roethlisberger, they could have four plays called at any time, and they could seamlessly move from one to another at the line of scrimmage.

We’re amid a project with Pro Football Focus right now, breaking down what they deemed to be the best plays of the 2014 season among Steelers players, and what we’re finding in breaking all those plays down is many of them are the result of what appears to be a play change at the line of scrimmage.

On top of all of that, they have the deepest wide receivers group in the league in terms of athleticism. Antonio Brown cannot be guarded, and we saw by the end of the season a remarkably talented receivers in Martavis Bryant (not just a one-trick pony, he ran underneath routes at a high level by the end of the year). Markus Wheaton had 68 catches, and he was up-and-down all year.

There’s a huge amount of potential in the offense, and even with setting a franchise record scoring 27.3 points a game last year, the 31.2 points a game they scored over their last 10 games could be more indicative of where they will be in 2015.

2) According to Pro Football Focus, Antonio Brown was the top rated receiver in the entire NFL. How has the undersized receiver been able to create such production for the Steelers?

 

I mentioned this above, and it’s not hyperbole. Brown cannot be guarded. He has 18 consecutive games with five catches and 70 yards. His streak of five catches with 50 yards in a game is somewhere close to 30 games now, nearly doubling the previous NFL record.

No one in the NFL is faster in and out of his breaks than Brown. He run extraordinarily precise routes, and with 229 catches just in the last two years, he obviously works well with Roethlisberger. Brown has great straight-line speed, and the combination of those factors make him an incredibly difficult assignment. He also has tremendous body control, and he’s used in such a way he can be anywhere on the field and run any route at any distance.

He also threw one of the weakest thrown touchdown passes in league history last year, and I’m sure PFF gave him a point for it.

3) Le’Veon Bell will be suspended for the first three games of the regular season.  How will the Steelers attempt to compensate for this loss to start out their season?

I’m not sure there’s much they’re going to be able to do. With all due respect to the Baltimore Ravens, a fine team in 2014 and a worthy 30-17 victor over Pittsburgh in the AFC Wild Card playoffs last year, the Steelers’ offense without Bell is the Ravens’ defense without Haloti Ngata. Look at the difference in Baltimore’s defense during Ngata’s suspension, then when he was back.

That cliff may be even steeper in Pittsburgh. Bell was a first team All Pro player, and he’s the best receiving running back in the game. Incredibly quick off the cut, and extremely difficult to defend in coverage.

Because of that, there are big plays littered over the Steelers’ offensive film of single-high safety coverage with two linebackers flanking either side of Bell and a safety covering him in man. That’s the kind of fear Bell imposes, and that’s why the Ravens’ edge defenders didn’t even bother reading run in the playoffs. They just pinned their ears back and teed off on Roethlisberger all game. It eventually got to him, as they forced two late turnovers to seal the game.

This isn’t to say Pittsburgh would have won if Bell was in the game, but the Ravens’ outside linebackers could not have pushed as hard up the field as they did if Bell was there. I can’t see the Ravens being willing to put that secondary against Pittsburgh’s receivers in single coverage, so they would have had a more difficult time achieving the success that they did.

4) The Steelers defense, on the other hand, struggled greatly in 2014. They finished 30th in defensive DVOA, ahead of only the Saints and the Falcons. Why did the Steelers defense struggle so much?

The worst part is, the Falcons and Saints defenses both had success against the Steelers’ offense in the first halves of those games.

They struggled because they don’t get to the quarterback often, and they don’t take the ball away. I know that seems simple, but their declining defense has been like this for three years now, but it was four years ago they stopped making splash plays. The 2011 Steelers were an absolute statistical anomaly. No team ever had made the playoffs forcing as few turnovers as that unit did.

Defensive coordinator Dick LeBeau was let go this offseason because the Steelers have invested too much in the defense in terms of the draft (five of the team’s last six first and second round picks, through 2015, are defensive players) to get the results they’re getting.

To be fair, we saw a bit better effort in the takeaways department over the last four games (all wins, seven takeaways, including a huge forced fumble that set up a Week 17 win over the Bengals). We saw some good things from inside linebacker Ryan Shazier as the year wore on and he got healthy. The Steelers had good play from Stephon Tuitt over that time as well.

Those complimentary kinds of players are meant to help set up the edge pass rush, though. What do the Steelers have with Jarvis Jones? Do we even really know? A rookie year was shortened by injury, and tarnished by poor play. He had two sacks and a forced fumble in his first 11 quarters of the 2014 season, but a wrist injury held him out of the next 10 games, and it was clear his wrist wasn’t right in the late-season games he did play in.

Bud Dupree, in my opinion, won’t see the field regularly either. An athlete who hasn’t played in the same defense from year to year since (presumably) high school. He came to Kentucky as a tight end, and played defensive end, and both inside and outside linebacker. He is in need of defensive immersion, and I don’t think we’ll see him a whole lot (note: I’m wrong a lot).

So it’s hard to say right now they don’t have a lot of the same issues heading into 2015. I think, with some health, they’ll get a boost with a more athletic option at strong safety (Troy Polamalu was on his last legs, and if he didn’t retire, he would have been released), a fully healthy Mike Mitchell (an athletic, playmaking safety who played last year on two groins that required offseason surgery) and Shazier, Tuitt and Cam Heyward all making impacts.

That won’t make them the 2010 Steelers, but if they can find a way to limit big plays and be around the middle of the pack in terms of points allowed, the offense is good enough to bring them to another AFC North title.

5) Many of the “old guard” players on the Steelers defense are either getting older or leaving the team. Troy Polamalu just retired, and both James Harrison and Ike Taylor are getting old. Who are some of the newer players that are expected to eventually replace them and how are they doing so far?

This gets hard to follow, I don’t blame you…Ike Taylor is gone, as is Polamalu, but they re-signed Harrison, who was a solid, if not outstanding, player in 2014. But these moves were all anticipated, or happened much earlier than people think they did. Taylor was hurt most of last season, and upon his return, played poorly enough he was benched over the final few games.

Polamalu wasn’t great but far from the player he was even a year and a half earlier. Defensive end Brett Keisel was released, and isn’t expected back, but he was really only a stop-gap as Tuitt prepared to assume the starting role. Shazier, along with Sean Spence and Vince Williams, played next to Lawrence Timmons, who’s now by far the longest tenured Steelers player on the defense who didn’t leave the team previously.

You’ll see good things from the front seven in Pittsburgh this year. They have an outstanding pair of ends in Tuitt and Heyward, and Timmons and Shazier are going to make for an excellent combination of well-rounded linebackers. There is valid concern about the production off the edge, but Arthur Moats did well in limited snaps last year, and Harrison and Jones can combine to make a strong presence at the right outside linebacker position.

Shamarko Thomas will replace Polamalu, and he’s probably the story of training camp. An excellent athlete, but after a rookie season in 2013 in which he played slot cornerback, followed by a 2014 season in which he didn’t play at all except special teams (literally), it’s hard to say where he is right now as a player.

If the front seven performs, and the safeties are stronger all-around, the cornerbacks don’t need to do a whole lot. Defense is a team effort, and they need better play from a lot of guys this season.

6) Both Troy Polamalu and Ed Reed retired this past season. If only one of them could get into the Hall of Fame on the first ballot, why should it be Polamalu over Reed?

I hate this argument. Is it really just the fact they both have the word “safety” in their position titles that make us compelled to compare two players that stand starkly in contrast to each other? Polamalu owned the line of scrimmage, and was so spontaneous and freakishly athletic, quarterbacks were terrified of them. Reed mentally abused quarterbacks, baiting them into challenging him deep to the point they just stopped trying to challenge him entirely.

Those kinds of descriptions are used throughout NFL history on linebackers and cornerbacks, not safeties. No strong safety nor free safety played the game like Polamalu and Reed did – including each other.

They’re both Super Bowl champions, they’re both defensive players of the year. One can argue Polamalu did more to contribute to two title teams while Reed was out of gas when he finally won his, and some can say Reed was better in his DPOY year than Polamalu was.

What I know is There wasn’t a better strong safety during his prime than Troy Polamalu, and there wasn’t a better free safety during his prime than Ed Reed. Do I care about the results of a slanted and largely political process as far as determining which of them goes in first? Do I care how many other safeties were put in the Hall in the past? Abso-freaking-lutely not.

Name all the safeties named Defensive Player of the Year, there are five of them (six if you count Charles Woodson in 2009). If you even try to compare the impact on the game made by Dick Anderson, Kenny Easley and Bob Sanders over the course of their careers to Reed or Polamalu,

They are both Hall of Fame players. Anyone who says otherwise didn’t watch either of them play in comparison to their peers. They can keep trying to compare safeties that played in the 1980s with the evolution that occurred to both safety positions because of Reed and Polamalu.

It’s too bad, though, they missed two phenomenal careers.

8) Time for some WAAAAY too early predictions. What record will the Steelers finish with this season? And how will the AFC North standings end up?

“Prediction?…..PAIN.” – Clubber Lang

I’m really not sure how this division is going to turn out, and in turn, it’s hard to see where the Steelers will be. The Ravens and Steelers have been following the same kind of blueprint for so long they really mirror each other, just one year before or after the other. That makes me think this is the year for the Steelers to take a step back due to the brutal schedule they face (toughest in the NFL, with or without Brady starting in Week 1, which may be the single-biggest advantage given to the Steelers ever).

Getting back to Ngata, though, I don’t see Timmy Jernigan being even close to as dominant a player as Ngata could be. That’s a big loss, period. Ray Lewis publicly requested the Ravens draft a nose tackle to help tie up blockers so he could run free and make plays. They drafted Ngata (traded back ONE pick with Cleveland to take him too…nice job, guys). Lewis never complained about it again.

Linebackers get better with players like him. Conversely, they aren’t as good without a guy like that.

I think their offense gets better, although I’m not sold on their receivers.

Is Cincinnati any good? Do we ever know with them? Geno Atkins is back with a year between his return from injury. That’s a lot of strength he’s likely to have re-gained.

I dunno…if there’s a 10-win team in the AFC North this year I think it’s Cincinnati or Baltimore. I think they’re going to brawl each other so badly, and with a dominant run game in Cleveland, any of those games will be tough wins. They all could conceivably split with each other, and if they’re 3-3 in the division, they have to go 7-3 outside it to finish 10-6. That’s tough.

Ehhh…I think Baltimore will win it, but if the Steelers can steal that first game against New England, and take out a 49ers team that’s under more overhaul than FIFA right now, I dunno…they could make some noise. Rams are gonna be tough this year, as is the rest of the NFC West. Tough year…I’ll go with 9-7 for them.