Pittsburgh Steelers’ general manager Kevin Colbert chose not to address the cornerback position when the 2014 NFL Draft came and went, unless you consider drafting Shaquille Richardson in the fifth round addressing the situation.
Despite Ike Taylor’s struggles throughout the 2013 campaign, Colbert also elected to not to address the position in free agency, electing to stick with what he has.
At the end of the day, that decision could prove costly as this secondary is not a very good one, as Tampa Bay Buccaneers quarterback Mike Glennon showed last Sunday.
As bad as Taylor has been throughout the past 20 games or so, there is a severe drop off with him on the sidelines nursing an arm injury.
Other teams know the Steelers’ secondary has issues and that the front seven hasn’t been able to generate much of a pass rush for a span of three-plus years now. That means teams are going to continue to attack the Steelers through the air and if the Steelers secondary doesn’t up their level of play, things are going to get ugly for this team real soon.
A roster that features corners: Taylor, William Gay, Cortez Allen, Brice McCain. B.W. Webb and Antwon Blake, along with safeties, Troy Polamalu, Mike Mitchell, Shamarko Thomas, Will Allen and Robert Golden sort of reminds me of a scene from the movie Major League.
“I’ve never heard of half of these guys and the ones I do know are way past their prime.”
“Most of these guys never had a prime.”
All joking aside, that is what the Steelers’ secondary has become, a collection of players past their prime to go along with journeymen that can’t play at a high enough level in the NFL.
A major problem for this team is on third down.
Take the Tampa game for instance. The Buccaneers were 0-for-5 on third down in the first half. They finished the game 7-for-13 on third down.
That’s the difference between winning and losing.
“We have to move on to next week,” said Gay. “The only thing we can do is correct the mistakes that we made and move on to next week.”
Some of the problem has to do with technique.
When the Steelers go Cover 2, Cortez Allen should often be taking an inside technique, making the quarterback throw the ball over top of him and underneath Troy Polamalu or Mike Mitchell. But Allen almost is all of the time taking an outside technique, resulting in easy completions underneath.
Allen has been beaten a lot since signing his big deal in the offseason and while Polamalu has been a liability in coverage for a few years now and doesn’t offer up much help to the corners, little things like that are the difference between winning and losing close games.
That’s not complicated. That’s football 101.
The bottom line is that this group of corners simply aren’t good enough to win consistently at this level.
The safeties aren’t much better.
While I love Polamalu, he was exposed by Aaron Rodgers and the Green Bay Packers in Super Bowl XLV and the problems haven’t gotten better. Now that he is older, calling Polamalu a liability in coverage is being kind.
And why is Polamalu on the field so much?
For a team that is supposedly so high on Thomas, he didn’t get one defensive snap on Sunday.
That either says something about their belief in Thomas or it says something about the Steelers unwillingness to adjust and change.
When Taylor went down in Week 3, Blake came in and got a majority of the snaps. While he isn’t anything to talk about either, he wasn’t on the field late in the fourth quarter, it was McCain.
An old scouting report from his days in Houston actually used the word “garbage” when describing him.
It showed when McCain was torched in the Steelers zone, allowing a big 41-yard catch towards the end of the game Sunday, which set up the Buccaneers winning touchdown.
“There’s no one to blame,” said McCain. “It’s a whole team effort. We just need to practice and get better.”
The bottom line is that the Steelers have ignored the position for a while now and are paying the price for it.
Another problem is that everything they do is predictable, from what coverage they will be in on certain down and distances to what blitzes they will run as Dick LeBeau has run the identical blitz packages for years.
If I and other writers can point these things out easily, you can bet that other teams know what’s coming as well.
“We talked about it all week,” said Tampa Bay wide receiver Louis Murphy, who caught the big 41-yard pass that led to the decisive touchdown. “We knew they were going to run Cover 2 late and that whole in their zone would be wide open. We called the play and we knew what they were going to do. All we had to do was execute.”
Not getting pressure is a huge problem and when you don’t have talent in the defensive backfield it creates problems.
But eventually you need your defensive backs to step up and make some plays.
If they don’t start doing so quickly, it is going to be a long season.
“We have had opportunities,” said Allen. ‘We just have to finish plays. We can’t be this highly penalized, but we have to execute the game plan. There are things that need to be corrected. We just need to finish our plays and individually finish our assignments.”
Judging by the start of the season that may be easier said than done.
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