One of the league’s worst defenses facing a historically productive offense — what could go wrong? Somehow, the Pittsburgh Steelers turned the script upside down, holding the Indianapolis Colts to their lowest point total of the season. After the Steelers’ 27-20 win, Mike Tomlin explained how Pittsburgh pulled it off.
“It started with minimizing their dynamic runner,” Tomlin said via the Steelers’ YouTube.
Jonathan Taylor has been on a league-MVP pace this season with 1,056 scrimmage yards and 14 total touchdowns through eight games. Against the Steelers, he had 45 rushing yards on 14 attempts, and just two receptions for 12 more yards. Pittsburgh prioritized shutting him down, and it opened up everything else it wanted to do on defense.
One of the reasons the Colts have been so effective offensively is their performance on early downs. The Steelers did a good job of creating obvious passing situations and unleashing their pass rush and turnover culture.
Limiting the run also took a wide variety of the Colts’ bread-and-butter plays off the table in the intermediate game.
“We did a nice job of eliminating the intermediate passing game off the play pass. But again, as I mentioned, you don’t get a chance to do that unless you’re minimizing the run,” Tomlin said. “If they’re running the ball successfully on you, that intermediate play pass is what comes next. And so we were able to maintain control of the run game, and it minimized some of that intermediate passing game. It started first and foremost with minimizing Taylor.”
Once they had the Colts playing out of character, that’s when the barrage of takeaways could take over. T.J. Watt started things with a strip-sack, and then they came in bunches. Daniel Jones was having an MVP-worthy campaign until Pittsburgh’s defense forced him to commit five turnovers.
The Steelers stopped the run a week ago against the Green Bay Packers, but they never managed to generate the turnovers or sacks necessary for the defense to take control of the game. Credit to the Steelers for staying the course, simplifying things on defense, and trusting that the pass rush and turnovers would eventually happen if they played fundamentally sound football.
Mike Tomlin’s defense has always been at its best when it takes away opposing teams’ top option and forces them to win in other ways. That’s exactly what the Steelers managed to do against the league’s top offense for a big and necessary Week 9 win.
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