CINCINNATI —The Pittsburgh Steelers spent their 2025 offseason revamping their defense, keeping it the league's most-expensive unit while attempting to tailor its talents to do things it failed to do down the stretch run of the 2024 season: stop the Baltimore Ravens on the ground and slow down the Cincinnati Bengals through the air.
To deal with the latter goal, the Steelers shipped out All-Pro safety Minkah Fitzpatrick , replacing him with a collection of journeymen at that position, and instead reallocated those resources to the cornerback position, where the team spent $10 million in free agency on Darius Slay , and traded Fitzpatrick for Jalen Ramsey to go along with Joey Porter Jr. and give the team three starting caliber cornerback.
It represented a wholesale shift in approach compared to the last few years, when the Steelers had largely ignored the slot cornerback position and spent more at safety than almost anyone else in the league.
The idea was that investing more in cover corners would allow the Steelers to face a team like the Bengals, with multiple high-end receiving threats, and still be able to play whatever kind of defense they wanted against them.
The Steelers over the last few years, with players like Patrick Peterson and Donte Jackson in the secondary, were limited to mostly playing zone coverage against the likes of Ja'Marr Chase, Tee Higgins and company.
In Thursday's loss in Cincinnati , they couldn't cover anyone. They tried to go man-to-man, as was the plan. Porter was flagged for DPI. Ramsey was beaten 1-on-1. The Steelers tried to switch off who was covering which man. They tried to zone. They tried many different zones: Cover 3, Cover 2, quarters. They tried two-man — a combination of man and zone.
Tomlin and Teryl Austin rolled through the rolodex of defensive coverages with a dizzying speed, trying over a dozen combination. Absolutely nothing worked. The Steelers couldn't cover routinely either Chase or Higgins, at any point throughout the entire game.
The dominant narrative on social media among Steelers fans after the game was that Tomlin and Austin wouldn't or couldn't make necessary adjustments, or that they weren't prepared for what Cincinnati did. Nothing could be further from the truth, and that's so much worse. Being unprepared or unwilling to change are relatively easy issues to fix. What the Steelers are dealing with is much more deep-seated.
"We double teamed (Chase) some, we double teamed (Higgins) some, had some mixes when required," Tomlin said. "They've got depth of talent. Just like the one play (Iosivas) made down the middle, we were doubling (Chase and Higgins), and so they were one-on-one in that circumstance. There's many ways you can analyze it, but the bottom line is they made more plays than we did."
Furthermore, their focus on trying to stop those two opened up other gaping holes in their defense. They blitzed, and that didn't routinely work. It also gave up big plays in the running game — by far the best day of the season for a beleaguered Cincinnati unit. The also lost track of secondary Cincinnati options like Noah Fant and Andrei Iosivas .
Instead of being able to handle Chase and Higgins in multiple ways, the Steelers' inability to handle them in any way created cascading effects that destroyed the impacfulness of the entire defense.
How and why did this happen? There are few reasonable answers, and none of them present a rosy future picture for the Steelers:
Cincinnati Bengals quarterback Joe Flacco in a game against the Pittsburgh Steelers on Oct. 16, 2025. — Ed Thompson / Steelers Now
The Bengals certainly expected the man-heavy initial approach — Chase said as much in his post-game press conference. That's not surprising. Most people were able to figure out the Steelers' idea for handling the Bengals as laid out above.
But when the Steelers started to change defenses, they never once seemed to catch Flacco off guard, and they very rarely seemed to present him with a coverage that he didn't have an answer for.
There is no defensive scheme that works when no one can cover anyone, so there's that. But the Steelers also don't, by rule, do a ton of disguising of their coverages, and when they usually do, it's more of a feel call from the players on the field than anything else.
With the entire defense in scramble mode from the second quarter on, the disguises went out the window, and they were almost never able to make Flacco hold onto the ball long enough to let the pass rush get home.
But I don't know how you can tell a defense that is routinely failing to execute its coverages to then start them from a different, more distant landmark in order to disguise intentions. The Steelers were so ineffective in coverage that they essentially took
Thursday nights are rough on everyone in the NFL. Heck, I'm tired and all I did was drive to Cincinnati.
But it makes some sense that the oldest team in the league would be more impacted by the lack of rest than another.
Slay is 34. Ramsey is 31. Chuck Clark , Juan Thornhill and Jabrill Peppers are 30. It would make sense that they'd have a harder time adjusting than the younger competitors on the other side of the ball.
This is the only explanation that isn't devastatingly bad for the future prognosis of what's going to happen to this defense.
Pittsburgh Steelers cornerback Joey Porter Jr. in a game against the Cincinnati Bengals on Oct. 17, 2025. — Ed Thompson / Steelers Now
The Steelers went out and spent a lot of money and resources to stop the Bengals, and the players they got to do that job are not able to do that job.
The Eagles were right and Slay is cooked. The Dolphins were right and Ramsey isn't the player he once was. Porter has not developed, can't get past his penalty issues, and can't be trusted to do the job he was drafted to do.
This outcome is, of course, irreversibly bad. Porter can still develop. Time doesn't ever march backward for veterans like Slay and Ramsey. And the fact that I didn't think the defense got any worse when Slay came out for a few play and Brandin Echols went in leads some credence to this idea.
One game is not proof, of course. But right now, it's hard to say anything other than the Steelers' entire offseason plan for stopping the Bengals — and for that matter, other teams with depth of receiving talent — was a failure.
"Yeah," Tomlin said. "We won't be defined by this performance, but it certainly was disappointing tonight."
The Steelers will have another crack at the Bengals later this season. They also face a deep group of receivers in 10 days in Pittsburgh, in Week 8 against the Green Bay Packers. There are opportunities for redemption, but there are only so many teams like this on the schedule.
Even if they eventually figure out why they couldn't execute almost any coverage routinely, even if it was just Thursday night weirdness, they failed in one of their major tasks they set out to accomplish this season — in an enormous moment.
With a win, the Steelers could have taken a commanding 3.5-game lead in the division, and essentially sink Cincinnati's chances of mounting a comeback before Joe Burrow returns.
Instead, Cincinnati is again alive, and the Steelers will have to sweat out a tough upcoming stretch of their schedule to see if their lead in the AFC North holds.
They'd really better hope that this win doesn't propel the Bengals into a climb to a playoff spot. If Cincinnati can pick apart this defense with Flacco, imagine what Joe Burrow could do to it in the postseason.
This article originally appeared on Steelers Now : Saunders: Problem With Steelers Secondary Isn't What You Think — It's Worse
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