PITTSBURGH —There was a lot that went wrong for the Pittsburgh Steelers in the 2025 season that came to an abrupt end on home turf on Monday night in a 30-6 beat-down at the hands of the Houston Texans.
Many, many things.
The Steelers started the season with Darius Slay and Juan Thornhill as starting members of their secondary. They later cut both of them. They brought in Slay and Jalen Ramsey to play cornerback, thinking they could play man-to-man defense against some of the best offenses in the league. Special teamer James Pierre turned out to be their second-best cornerback. Ramsey ended up being an OK safety.
They got rid of George Pickens because they didn't want his combustible personality around anymore, and then replaced him with DK Metcalf , who got himself suspended for the two most important games of the regular season for pushing a fan during a game.
Someone at the team facility literally stabbed their highest-paid player in the lung, causing him to miss three crucial games in December.
But of all of the things that went wrong for the Steelers this season, nothing went worse than the acquisition of tight end Jonnu Smith .
Pittsburgh Steelers tight end Jonnu Smith fails to secure a catch against the Cincinnati Bengals on Oct. 16, 2025. — Ed Thompson / Steelers Now
Smith came over to the Steelers as part of the same trade as Ramsey. The Steelers sought Ramsey, who was being traded by the Dolphins, but didn't want to pay in draft picks, so they made the trade work by sending safety Minkah Fitzpatrick to Miami , and getting Smith back to make the value work.
The Steelers spent most of their offseason looking for receiving options to play alongside Metcalf, and weren't in love with any of the options, going into the season without a bona fide wide receiver No. 2 for the second straight year.
But Smith was coming off an 884-yard season with the Miami Dolphins . Never much of a blocker, it looked like the Steelers might be able to pair him with Pat Freiermuth and use him as a pure receiving threat. Smith had extensive history with Steelers offensive coordinator Arthur Smith, having played with him before with the Tennessee Titans and Atlanta Falcons , so it seemed reasonable to believe that Arthur Smith would be able to get the most out of him.
Pittsburgh Steelers offensive coordinator Arthur Smith at OTAs on May 29, 2025. — Ed Thompson / Steelers Now
Instead, he got absolutely nothing. Jonnu Smith finished the regular season with 222 receiving yards — his smallest full-season contribution since he was a rookie in 2017, when he had 157 yards. That year, he was targeted 30 times. This season, he was targeted 54 times.
Smith finished the regular season with 4.1 yards per target. He was the worst tight end in the NFL in terms of yards per target. The second-worst, Noah Gray , Kansas City's blocking tight end, was 4.8. Brock Wright , another blocker, for Detroit , was at 4.9.
Not only was he the least-productive tight end in the NFL this season, he was one of the least-productive tight ends in recent NFL history. His 4.1 yards per target is dead last among all tight ends since 2019 with at least 50 targets, per The Score.
Of 57 tight ends with enough snaps to qualify, Pro Football Focus graded Smith as the third-worst run-blocking tight end in the league, behind only Kyle Pitts and David Njoku . PFF's grades are by no means perfect, but they usually at least land in right area code.
So Smith was the least-productive tight end in the NFL when targeted, and one of the worst blocking tight ends in the NFL. And somehow, that's not even the worst part.
Almost every time that Smith was on the field for the Steelers, that meant that a better player was on the sideline.
Freiermuth played a career-low 552 snaps this season. He was targeted 54 times, the second-lowest total of his career. He missed five games in 2023, so it is the lowest on a per-game basis. And what did he do with those targets? A career high nine yards per target. That was tied for 10th in the league among tight ends.
Freiermuth is not a great blocker, but he's significantly better than Smith. Darnell Washington is an elite blocking tight end, and he averaged 8.5 yards per target. Connor Heyward averaged 5.3 yards per target and is also a much better blocker than Smith.
Pittsburgh Steelers quarterback Aaron Rodgers and tight end Pat Freiermuth in a game against the Miami Dolphins on Dec. 15, 2025. — Ed Thompson / Steelers Now
Every time the Steelers had Smith on the field, they had a better option. Every time the Steelers targeted Smith, they had a better option. And don't put that on Steelers quarterback Aaron Rodgers . Many of Smith's touches were of the engineered variety — screens and shovel passes and things where the quarterback doesn't have a lot, if any, say on where the ball is going to go.
Asked about why the team, all season, was unable to get Freiermuth more involved in the offense after Monday's loss, Rodgers said only:
"Yeah, I don't know. I don't have a good answer for that."
Of course, that's hogwash. Rodgers knows exactly why. There are only a few reasons a player doesn't get the ball: either he stinks and he doesn't get open, the quarterback doesn't trust him to catch it, he doesn't run the right routes, or the team just doesn't call plays that are designed with the idea of getting him the ball very often.
We have a long enough history of Freiermuth at the NFL level to pretty plainly rule out all the but the last one.
Jonnu Smith was Arthur Smith's guy. I don't know if the offensive coordinator had a big part in the acquisition of the tight end, but he certainly had a big say in how much he played, and almost every time No. 81 crossed the white line to leave the Steelers sideline this season, it was a mistake, and they left a more-effective player behind.
While the Steelers made a lot of mistakes this season, they also did a nice job of correcting a lot of them. Mike Tomlin, Teryl Austin and company rebuild the secondary on the fly, jettisoning Slay and Thornhill, moving Ramsey and elevating Pierre. It wasn't perfect, but they recognized that they had a problem and did what they could to fix it.
The problem at tight end was far easier to solve: just give every single one of Smith's snaps to Freiermuth, the better and more effective receiver and blocker standing right next to him on the bench.
Instead, they did nothing. Over the course of the regular season, Smith played 52% of the team's offense snaps.
In the playoff game against the Texans, he played 52.6%. He was targeted three times. Those three targets gained a combined one yard. Freiermuth was also targeted three times, gaining 18.
The acquisition of Smith was a failure, but when taken in context with the rest of the offseason, a forgivable one. They made an attempt at a fix to a problem, even if it did not look like an ideal one. You could see how it could have worked.
But the unwillingness of Arthur Smith to pull the plug on Smith, when it was clear he wasn't working out, is unforgivable, and equally so for Tomlin's inability to see his own coordinator's blind spot and step in. Of all of the team's failures and all of the team's mistakes this season, their mismanagement of the tight end position is near the top in terms of the most senseless and frustrating.
The acquisition failed. The coordinator failed. The head coach failed. And the Steelers suffered as a result.
This article originally appeared on Steelers Now : Saunders: Failure to Feed Freiermuth a Microcosm of Steelers Many Mistakes
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