Every day in 2025 has felt like the sky is falling, but there’s no better proof of that than the recent struggles of the Pittsburgh Steelers defense. After allowing 32 points to the New York Jets in Week 1, Pittsburgh proceeded to have Kenneth Walker and the Seattle Seahawks run all over them to the tune of a 31-17 loss.
Admittedly, six of those points admittedly came from an unusual special teams blunder. However, the struggles go beyond points allowed. The Steelers currently rank 27th in overall defensive DVOA (20.5%), which also accounts for downs, yards to go, and field position. For context, Pittsburgh finished eighth in defensive DVOA for 2024 (-5.9%), and sixth in 2023 (-8.0%).
It’s safe to say these are unusual times for Mike Tomlin’s team. Do teams that start this poorly on defense tend to recover, or is it the start of a lost year? What about teams that start this poorly after previous years of strong defensive play? In today’s piece, I’m going to break down everything that’s gone wrong with the Steelers defense, as well as examine what pertinent trends through history can tell us about what to expect.
Draft Woes
As part of this independent study, I’ve been reading a book about football analytics. Released three years ago, one particular section caught my attention: a chapter-long hypothesis that claimed drafting success was largely random, and that the only two teams drafted significantly better than the pack: the Green Bay and Pittsburgh. Now, without getting into the nitty gritty about my thoughts on the author’s methodology or the final results, what I will say for here is that the Steelers have suffered from an unfortunate double-whammy for drafting: an emphasis on offensive players over defensive players, and little to no long-term success in drafting talent on either end of the field.
For this section, I examined every single Steelers draft from 2018 to 2022. Using a personal draft value chart that I made previously this year, I then compared Pro Football Reference’s Approximate Value – a rough, but generally accurate assessment of a player’s ‘value’ to a team – of a player to the expected value that comes from their position in the draft. Finally, I filtered the data to focus only on first and second round draft picks: the most important places within the draft.
| Year | Pick | Player | Expected_AV | wAV |
| 2018 | 28 | Terrell Edmunds | 27.41 | 27 |
| 2018 | 60 | James Washington | 17.8 | 11 |
| 2019 | 10 | Devin Bush Jr. | 34.87 | 28 |
| 2020 | 49 | Chase Claypool | 20.62 | 19 |
| 2021 | 24 | Najee Harris | 28.93 | 29 |
| 2021 | 55 | Pat Freiermuth | 19.02 | 18 |
| 2022 | 20 | Kenny Pickett | 30.52 | 14 |
| 2022 | 52 | George Pickens | 19.8 | 24 |
Within these selections, Pittsburgh was expected to draft approximately players worth 198.97 of AV. Their actual number was 170, meaning that the Steelers lost about 28.97 of AV in five years through poor early drafting. This is the equivalent of losing an extra starter for five seasons. The only players to not disappoint out of the above – Harris and Pickens – are no longer on the team. Meanwhile, they only had two first-round and second-round picks go to defensive players, and none of them are confident success stories. Safety Terrell Edmunds was a bust and the injury-prone Devin Bush ended up leaving.
In fairness, the Steelers have drafted three defensive players in this area over the last few years. The problem is none of them have panned out yet. Keeanu Benton and Joey Porter Jr. have each failed to capitalize off initially promising starts, and we haven’t actually seen 2025 draftee Derrick Hampton out on a football field.
Despite the lack of homegrown talent behind them, it hasn’t necessarily showed up until now. Pittsburgh has instead relied on big three of sorts: edge defender TJ Watt, defensive lineman Cameron Heyward Jr., and linebacker Alex Highsmith. To complement them, they’ve typically picked up free agents or swung trades for other journeyman role players. Last off-season, however, Pittsburgh officially made their defense the most expensive in pro football, most notably with the following moves, among others.
- A $123 million contract over three years to edge defender TJ Watt
- A $84.7 million contract over four years to cornerback Jalen Ramsay – in a wild trade done with the Miami Dolphins. More on this later.
- A $10 million contract over one year to cornerback Darius Slay
- A $10 million contract over two years to linebacker Malik Harrison
- A $3 million contract over one year to safety Juan Thornhill
- A $2.8 million contract over one year to defensive lineman Daniel Ekuale
These roster decisions did not stop the Steelers from splurging on the offensive end. Pittsburgh signed quarterback Aaron Rodgers for a mercenary one-year deal at $16.65 million, while also trading away a second round pick for star wideout DK Metcalf, who is now with the team for $150 million for five years. Heading into this season, the idea was that a rejuvenated Rodgers behind a good enough offensive line and a star wide receiver could lead a league average offense. At the same time, the defense, bolstered by the signing of the main franchise player and a new dynamic cornerback duo, could take an even bigger step forward.
Issues at Cornerback, Safety & Linebacker
After initially looking like a steal for the Steelers, the Fitzpatrick-Ramsay trade has been a disappointment. According to Pro Football Focus, Ramsay has given up 134 passing yards when targeted by opposing quarterbacks, as well as a touchdown (though he has one interception). At the same time, Darius Slay has given up 61 yards and a 139.6 opposing passer rating. Instead of having an elite cornerback duo, Pittsburgh has had mediocre to outright bad results.
Worse yet, there has been a lack of strong play at safety with Fitzpatrick no longer on the team and the sidelining of other safety DeShone Elliot. The two remaining safeties to take Fitzpatrick’s spot in the roster – veteran Chuck Clark and recent signing Thornhill – have not nearly stepped up to completely fill the void in the roster. In reaction, the Steelers recently picked up ex-New England Patriots safety Jabrill Peppers, but he hasn’t played yet.
Highsmith hasn’t matched his previous performances either. Whether it’s his recent ankle injury, not being one hundred percent, or simply playing worse, Pittsburgh hasn’t had the strong quality of play at linebacker that they’re used to. Behind Highsmith, Payton Wilson and Patrick Queen, have been lit up to the tune of a combined 176 passing yards allowed. To make matters worse, Highsmith is missing his upcoming game against the Patriots. For a team that already has given up an astronomical 0.85 EPA per pass play (per SumerSports) to opposing 12 personnel units (31st in the league), this could make an existing bad much worse. Ironically, New England is the only team worse than the Steelers, but that’s a story for another time.
While Watt has continued to play like a star, there’s not much else to celebrate. Wilson, whom I mentioned before as a liability in coverage, has looked totally lost in run defense this year, missing a tackle in each of his two starts. Benton, whom I also previously brought up, has struggled, while Harrison, who didn’t look too bad against the Jets, is now on injured reserve. The aforementioned Heyward is still around at a decent level, yet looks a step slower.
The older players have underwhelmed. This young talent is non-existent, non-emergent, or always hurt. All it takes is one injury or missed time from Watt for the floor to fully collapse. At the same time though, it has only been two weeks. What can we expect from the Steelers – and defenses that generally perform as poorly as they have this early into the season – moving forward?
Historical Contemporaries
Thanks to FTN Fantasy’s Historical Archive, I was able to capture starting defensive DVOA splits as of Week 2 for each season from 2002 to 2024. Combined with the historical end-of-season defensive DVOA splits for every team for every time span, I was able to compile each team’s eventual end-of-year values in defensive DVOA. After this, I then chunked the teams based on their early-season performances and built a box plot measuring how those defenses tended to hold up by the end of the season.
Before coming away with a takeaway, we have to acknowledge the inherent noisiness in the data set. For example, one consideration here is the high standard deviation among net shifts in defensive DVOA for all teams (17.56%) and the handful of notable outliers. The most obvious example would be the 2007 New York Giants, who went from allowing a combined 80 points in their first two weeks to stopping the greatest offense in NFL history in the Super Bowl. Another notable outlier would be coach Tomlin’s very own 2019 Steelers: a team that overcame an 0-2 start to finish 8-8, and under modern rules, would have made the playoffs as a No. 7 seed, as Bill Barnwell detailed.
With that said, and zooming out from the outliers, the bins help crystallize the broader trend. Extreme outliers, both good and bad, tend to creep closer to the mean, but not that far away from their initial category. Although the “WOAT” units don’t always stay in that same territory, they rarely climb all the way up to competence. If anything, the volatility largely lies in the middle: “Average” or “Bad” early-season defenses are the ones with the widest range of outcomes. The aggregate data suggests that extremes in early defensive performance are sticky, while the muddled middle is where regression, coaching adjustments, or injuries create the most noise.
I don’t think the Steelers are going to remain the 27th ranked DVOA defense for the rest of the season. It is difficult for me to envision a Tomlin-led team being sustainably terrible on that end of the ball. However, the data on poorly performing teams this early in the season suggests that they won’t be that much better; this is a defense that’s had a dropoff coming for a long time. My guess is that they end up somewhere around the early 20s by the end of the season.
What To Expect?
The correlation between early-season and end-of-season defense is strong enough that what we’ve seen through two weeks can’t be hand-waved as noise. Across two decades of data, the overwhelming pattern is that teams who start out like this rarely climb back to elite form. The Steelers may still have a few paths to bucking that trend, like if Watt can stay healthy and dominant, if Hampton returns later this season, or if Peppers can provide a boost in the backfield, but defenses tend to be not too different from what they show us early on.
For Pittsburgh, that’s an unusual reality. After years of taking the defense for granted as a stabilizing force, and spending so many resources trying to fix the offense, the Steelers have found themselves in a position where their defense, long-heralded as a strength, now has several question marks. Rather than the other way around, the burden of proof falls on Pittsburgh to show doubters they have the answers.
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