For quite a while, communication issues have been prevalent on the Pittsburgh Steelers’ defense. They were evident throughout the 2024 season, and really emerged at the end of the year as the team collapsed down the stretch.
Once again, communication problems popped up as the 2025 season began. However, the defense has shown some steady improvement over the last few weeks, and had potentially their most complete effort in the win against the Browns on Sunday. Speaking after the game, Patrick Queen talked about the ways the level of communication has improved.
“Everybody’s talking,” Queen said, via Post-Gazette Sports on YouTube. “We all just trust each other, we all going out there playing fast. We getting the communication out quick, we understand the formation, we’re going out there and playing football.”
It’s good to hear this from Patrick Queen, as he’s the most essential part of these efforts. He wears the green dot, and thus has to relay the calls to the rest of the unit. Even in areas in which he doesn’t directly do anything wrong, any miscommunications revolve around him at some level for that reason.
While the defense has looked better in general, Sunday was their best effort considering their struggles in this regard. Most of these communication issues have come on deep passes, and the Steelers were beat by the same exact route concept in back to back weeks during the first two weeks of the year.
That wasn’t the case Sunday. The Browns do have some deep threats, but Pittsburgh kept everything quiet down the field. The Browns didn’t even look to take any deep shots, with most of the longer passes from Dillon Gabriel only being about 10-15 yards downfield.
Part of the reason for this could simply be the fact that they’ve got more time playing together. There are a lot of new faces on the unit this year, and some first time starters as well. They clearly weren’t on the same page during the first two weeks, but had some marginal improvements in Week 3. In Week 4, they were excellent up until the very end of the fourth quarter. Now they’ve had five games plus a bye week to get on the same page. There’s also the fact that they’ve gotten key players back from injury in recent weeks.
With the bye week to prepare and get healthy, Patrick Queen’s defense had a great game Sunday. They allowed just 65 rushing yards to a team that’s running the ball well this year, and allowed just 248 in total. Most importantly, it provides plenty of momentum going forward, with the schedule getting a lot tougher in the near future.
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