2019 IDP Projections: Pittsburgh Steelers

Tom Kislingbury

As per last year, I’ll be sharing projections for every team in the NFL. I use past production in specific roles for each team’s scheme to work out realistic production profiles. You can see how accurate I was in 2018 in my IDP Projection Marking series.

The Steelers have undertaken a bit of a rebuilding job on their defense over the last couple of years in particular. As recently as 2016, Ross Cockrell, Mike Mitchell, Lawrence Timmons and James Harrison were mainstays on this unit. All those players have gone with Artie Burns, Terrell Edmunds, Devin Bush, and T.J. Watt all coming in as replacements.

They’ve been an up-and-down team in recent years with some excellent players and some very weak performers. Let’s see where they’re going to fall in 2019.

Defensive tackle

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Javon Hargraves has been the “starter” for three straight years now – and he’s never played 500 snaps in a regular season. This defense (unsurprisingly) just does not rely much on a nose tackle. As a result, he’s not the sort of IDP you should be going after unless you’re in a 32-team league.

Defensive end

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What happens instead is Cam Heyward and Stephon Tuitt play inside on passing downs. They’re both excellent players and they’ve been extremely productive together. In the last five seasons (since they’ve both been starters), they have a total of 443 pressures with three separate seasons of 100+ pressures. This is excellent.

Having said that, they’ve only delivered 258 solo tackles in that period. That’s just a 4.8% tackle efficiency which is extremely low. These two are really good players but because they’re asked to play so much in the trenches, they’re not ideal IDPs. You just have to hope you get a good sack:pressure conversion ratio.

That does happen (Heyward has hit about 22% and 19% in his last two years) but it’s not a guaranteed thing, and it’s good not to have to rely on hope for production.

Inside linebacker

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This is all about Devin Bush. He’s the player they’ve been trying to deploy at the position for years. After three years of disappointing play, it finally seemed like Ryan Shazier might have become the guy in 2017 before he had that nasty injury.

Bush is the style of mobile LB the Steelers know they need in the modern NFL with Mark Barron a nice backup. Expect Bush to come in and hit the ground running, especially seeing as he’ll likely be fairly heavily targeted because the NFL loves going after rookie LBs.

Vince Williams will continue in the other spot. But because he rushes the passer a lot (over 10% of his snaps in general and 16% in 2018), he’s an inefficient IDP.

Outside linebacker

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T.J. Watt has been excellent so far with 20 sacks in two years but there’s also some weirdness behind that headline number. He has “just” 92 pressures in his career so far which is good – but behind 40 other players during the same period. The reason his sacks look great is that he’s converted 22% of his pressures. That’s an extremely high number and a worrying one once you know that sack conversion rate is not sticky across years. Watt has definitely developed as a player, but he’ll likely need to be a better player in 2019 just to keep pace with his past production.

Another fun stat for him: a quarter of all Watt’s sacks have come in week one games. He has played just nine % of his career snaps in week one games.

Bud Dupree is the starter on the other side. He’s an average player with average production from his playing time. The Steelers are likely hoping one of the young backups can step up and play more.

Cornerback

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This is the biggest worry on this defense. Joe Haden played surprisingly well in 2019 but he’s over 30 and no-one’s idea of a long-term solution. Steven Nelson was productive in 2018 mainly through snap count. He led the whole NFL in spas with nearly 1,200. Don’t go thinking he’s a great player who will automatically secure loads of tackles. Then you’ve got Artie Burns, who’s just been very disappointing since he was drafted in the first round.

If you’ve got to go for anyone, then it’s probably Haden but you can likely find more enticing options.

Safety

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Terrell Edmunds was extremely underwhelming in his rookie season. He played nearly 1,000 snaps but produced just 58 total tackles – an efficiency of just 6.93%. The Steelers played him deep about half the time which didn’t help but he has to shoulder some blame too.

Sean Davis played deep far more often (about 80%) but still produced way more total tackles with 81.

This is very odd. There’s a pretty good correlation between playing on the box and tackles so this is topsy-turvy. Whatever the reason for it (very likely just Edmunds adapting to the NFL), it should flip in 2019.

Stud – Devin Bush, LB

2018 saw rookie LBs come in and blow the competition away. That doesn’t happen too often but it could well do again with Bush the most likely player to manage it this year.

Disappointment – Javon Hargrave, DT

A player who is on the field for fewer than 500 snaps should not be on your IDP roster.

Darkhorse – Terrell Edmunds, S

It will require some luck to make Edmunds a top-12 performer, but it’ll be a surprise if 2019 is not significantly better for him than 2018 was.

Summary

Aside from the issues at corner, this is set up to be a pretty decent defense in 2019. Finishing top ten (as opposed to strictly mid-table as they did in 2018) is very much a possibility.

Thanks for reading.

tom kislingbury