Pittsburgh Steelers’ defensive game plan was a complete failure
For much of Sunday night, you could be forgiven for thinking the Pittsburgh Steelers coaching staff was acting against its own interest as it watched quarterback Tom Brady and the New England Patriots offense drive up and down the field.
As the in-game broadcast pointed out, Steelers defensive coordinator Keith Butler and his defense opted to remain in zone coverage throughout, a foolhardy plan against any of the league’s better quarterbacks.
The plan, or more accurately the lack of adjustments, was, to be blunt, clownish. As I’ve often written, a team cannot play a vast majority of zone defense without a consistent and overwhelming amount of pressure up front.
So why did the Steelers opt to play zone? The Patriots are built as an offense to attack man coverage. Through their overwhelming number of personnel packages, formations, and alignments and plays they’re constantly working to create individual matchup advantages. Their combination of personnel packages and variety of alignments — fullbacks, tight ends and running backs moving right across the formation — is designed to give Brady a pre-snap key — is it zone or man? — and if it’s man, to identify which matchup he wants to go to before the ball is snapped.
Furthermore, most of their base concepts are man-beaters: plays designed to specifically attack man coverage. That could be receivers crisscrossing at the line of scrimmage (switch release) or crossing each other up while running a pattern.
It culminates in a system that wins mostly through play design, and one that allows Brady to get rid of the ball in an instant, keeping the majority of pass rushes at bay. To combat that, teams, like the Steelers, will drop back into zones and force Brady to figure out what the defense is running after the snap.
Pittsburgh has been a zone-based team all season (well, for a decade really), and have a raft of young players at pivotal positions. Playing zone allows those young guys to play with more freedom and is intended to mitigate the need for communication.
But none of that was the case on Sunday night.
Brady and his offense exposed flaws in the Steelers system. They jumped into a no-huddle, hurry-up attack that forced the Steelers’ young group to communicate. It also made a fairly simplistic defense even more basic than usual, running the same coverages time and time again: A variety of Cover-3 looks with some Tampa-2 sprinkled in.
With the speed of the offense and a limited amount of coverages, Brady had a simple key, only needing to read the movements of an individual safety. If the safety buzzed down, it was Cover-3 and he would attack a seam. If the safety stayed high, it was Cover-2 and Brady would look for out throws or soft spots in the zone.
Brady’s mental processing is as good as there’s ever been. Even when teams run a variety of different looks or disguises he can catch them. But roll into Foxboro playing as basic as you can imagine on the back end and a team is asking for him to pick it apart.
What was most striking is not just that Steelers coach Mike Tomlin and Butler decided to run zones almost exclusively, it was the style of zones. They used basic spot-dropping, where a defender drops to his zone as quickly as possible and reads the quarterback and the offense from there. There was no variety. No combination coverages, no traps, and a lack of pattern-matching, where corners are able to read route progressions before picking up a receiver and are able to re-route receivers at the line of scrimmage.
Throughout the game the Patriots were able to use a variety of formations to attack individual zone defenders, often getting one of their slot receivers isolated 1-on-1 with a linebacker. As usual, the Patriots’ inside receivers are given options on almost all of their routes: attacking their isolated defender and cutting inside or outside out of their break depending on the coverage. It’s then up to Brady to read the same coverage, be on the same page as the receiver, and deliver the ball before a defender can close the gap.
Of course, Brady was near perfect. They were able to consistently churn out first downs by isolating second-level defenders — particularly linebacker Lawrence Timmons — and hitting voids in the zones.
In the teams’ first matchup earlier in the year the Patriots executed the same tactics with a similar degree of success. Yet the Tomlin-Butler combo seemed to make no adjustments for this time around.
Giving receivers a free release, like in the above example, was particularly egregious. Even if, given the youth and inexperience on defense, Pittsburgh felt more comfortable with its secondary in zones, it still needed to jam receivers before dropping — a style used by the likes of Seattle and Atlanta.
Without getting their hands on receivers they were unable to disrupt the rhythm and timing of the Patriots’ rhythm-based passing game. And when that was combined with high volume of switch releases from the Patriots receivers, it caused all kinds of route recognition and communication problems for the defense, consistently leading to coverage breakdowns.
Chris Hogan’s first touchdown was a perfect example. The Patriots’ attacked with a post-wheel concept that had Hogan and Danny Amendola switching their releases. Steelers boundary corner Ross Cockrell sat in a mid-zone and was confused as to whether to take the outside release or follow Hogan inside. His indecision, followed by his decision to stick outside, gave Hogan a free route from the line of scrimmage to the end zone, where Brady found him for the easy score.
But it wasn’t just down in the scoring area. Receivers were running free all night, with defensive coverage breakdowns gifting them the time to sit down on routes and wait patiently for the ball to arrive.
Even when the Steelers finally made some adjustments, with the game well out of hand in the third quarter, their man-to-man coverage was torched. On this play, it’s unclear whether cornerback William Gay gave up covering Hogan in the slot, or whether there was another breakdown in what he thought the coverage was supposed to be.
A lack of contested releases, and poor communication led to Brady throwing just 5.3 percent of his passes into tight windows, per Next Gen Stats. The league average is 19.4 percent
Yet it wasn’t just the back-end that was an issue. The decision to play so much zone was a calculated gamble that they’d be able to pressure Brady, move him off his spot, and attack the ball once he made throws. But the plan relied on the front generating pressure, and it didn’t.
That shouldn’t be a shock to the Steelers staff. They finished the season 17th in the league at pressuring opposing quarterbacks’ dropbacks, and had a heavy reliance on 38-year old James Harrison wrecking an offensive line protections by dominating whoever was asked to block him at left tackle. Unfortunately for Harrison, he had a poor matchup against Nate Solder. Solder can struggle against first-step quickness, but after the initial phase he is a true technician. Harrison’s game is more about power and nuance as a pass rusher. Without an explosive first step he was stonewalled by Solder and failed to record a single pressure all game.
However, although Pittsburgh’s front doesn’t create an awful lot of pressure, when it does get home it’s usually through blitz designs or zone pressures that gets free runners on the quarterback. In a one-game sample size that could easily be a game-changing play.
It didn’t work out that way on Sunday. The Patriots offensive line picked up every blitz package that Butler threw at them. And that, in turn, neutralized the bluff blitzes that they’ve used to great effect to fool quarterbacks into mistakes — defenders feigning a blitz pre-snap before dropping out. Brady and his offensive line picked all of them up, giving the quarterback plenty of time to survey the field and find the soft spots in zone coverage.
In fact, the only time Pittsburgh was able to pressure Brady was on the few occasions when one of its uber-talented big guys inside won an individual battle.
Brady’s numbers against Tomlin-led Steelers defenses now stand at a gaudy 71.7 percent completion percentage, 2,273 yards, 21 touchdowns, and 0 interceptions. “We stand by what we did, we didn’t do it well enough.” Tomlin said after the game. But that’s simply foolish. And Tomlin is no fool. The plan was a poor one: lacking variety, disguise and creativity.
In the biggest game of their season the Steelers dropped the ball. Their staff was outcoached and the players were outexecuted.
Originally published at www.all22.com on January 24, 2017.
