This is part 3 of a four part* series, looking at the Steelers defensive performances from last year at several different points — from games 1 to 10 (when the Steelers were 10-0 and their defense was dominant), games 11 to 16 (during which the team fell to 2-4), and over the full season.

I compiled some individual stats during the extended postponement of the Thanksgiving contest aganst Baltimore, then again at the end of the year — looking especially at league rankings (using profootballreference.com as a guide). Then I did a little number crunching of my own and broke the lists down by conference and position.

Part 1: Inside Linebackers can be found HERE.
Part 2: Safeties can be found HERE
Part 3: Cornerbacks can be found HERE
This is the final edition: Pass Rushers

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This Round: Pass Rushers

Photo by Justin K. Aller/Getty Images

This edition will likely be a bit messier than the other three essays. There are more ways of breaking down “pass rush,” and multiple position groups participate in each. I’ll try to keep it contained and concise.

Most of the comparisons will be made based on averages (i.e. “sacks per game” rather than “total sacks accumulated”), but before we dig in, let’s take a quick peak at the raw numbers.

Just a quick glance at these stats tells me one thing: T.J. Watt is an absolute monster. Goodness. Watt, Bud Dupree, Stephon Tuitt, and Cameron Heyward all look fantastic here. But wow, T.J.

Over the last six games, Watt still looks like a man among boys (even on this defense, which, as you’ll see, was full of power players).

Not all of these players will be instructive in every category, but I wanted to give a baseline for the men who would be interesting before we start. On that note, Tyson Alualu will factor into some of the lists below. I didn’t track him in every category during week 10, so I didn’t have all of his numbers, but you’ll see him a few times below. Along with Alualu, this is the list of players who affected the Steelers 2020 pass rush the most.

You’ll notice that Bud Dupree and Mike Hilton are included, though neither will play in Pittsburgh this fall. Alex Highsmith is also here, and his growth will make a huge difference in the defense as well. Hopefully looking through these numbers can give us some insight into what this will all add up to when the rubber hits the road in September.

Let’s go.

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Sacks per Game

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Okay, first thing’s first: during the season’s opening 10 games, the Steelers had the AFC’s top two linebackers, top defensive back, and third best defensive lineman (with the 9th best linebacker too) in sacks. Holy crap.

Through seven weeks, the Steelers were on pace for 69 sacks (the NFL record is 72). At week 10, they were still headed for 61. That pace didn’t fall off too terribly (the team finished with 56). But this opening stretch was truly ferocious.

These numbers are harder to make sense of without the rankings to help contextualize. So let me just point to a couple of observations:

1 - Watt, Spillane, Highsmith, Tuitt, and Heyward all increased their rate of getting sacks.

2 - Alex Highsmith was sent in on a blitz 20 times in the final six games, and Mike Hilton 18 times. Between them, they only got home once. Yikes.

3 - On the flip side, T.J. Watt only blitzed 11 times, and came away with six sacks. Six. Wow.

A team sporting T.J. Watt, Bud Dupree, and Stephon Tuitt is a terrifying defense. Add in pressure up the middle from the inside linebackers and interior linemen, and frequent terror off the edge from the best corner-blitz in the NFL, and this team must have been nightmare fuel for opposing offsenses.

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Hurries per Game

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Because of the sprawl of players and positions rushing the passer, I’m only highlighting those whose stats seem to reveal something. That’s why Vince Williams and Mike Hilton don’t appear here; neither registered enough Hurries to indicate much.

Watt and Dupree are looking more and more like a “Harrison/Woodley” or “Lloyd/Greene” pairing. These two really dominated as long as they both took the field. What a crime that Dupree tore up his knee.

Ineresting to note: when Dupree went down in the season’s eleventh game, the Steelers’ defensive line began to carry more of the slack — forcing quarterbacks to unload passes early or run for their lives. This was a flexible defense.

(Side thought: the Steelers run defense faded down the stretch. I wonder if part of that can be attributed to the DL trying to pick up the slack from Dupree’s absense, rather than clogging rushing lanes. I don’t have the information to make a judgment on that, but it seems possible.)

And once again, T.J. Watt distinguishes himself. Meanwhile, Tuitt, Heyward, and Dupree all look like Pro Bowlers as well. Four players in the top 22 of the AFC at forcing quarterbacks into a panic is a great look.

It might be harder to make sense of the rest, so here’s another way to unpack these numbers, particularly concerning Robert Spillane and Alex Highsmith: ask what percentage of their blitzes resulted in hurries. By that calculation, Watt forced a hurry on 20.9% of the plays he was sent on a blitz. Second on the team, believe it or not, was Alex Highsmith, who forced a hurry on 16.7% of his blitzes. Bud Dupree, meanwhile, forced a hurry 14.8% of the time. (Spillane: 13.3%.)

This isn’t a perfect metric — it obviously doesn’t apply to the D-Linemen, who are never technically blitzers. But perhaps it can help make sense of these more elusive numbers.

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Quarterback Hits per Game

Charles LeClaire-USA TODAY Sports

Once again, several Steelers players were involved in massive ties, so I didn’t bother listing the rankings for them. I’ve included them for comparison purposes.

Okay, I’m going to stop freaking out about the level of dominance I’m seeing here. But seriously — look at these guys. The Steelers had four players who are in the top 5 in the league at their positions, and four players in the top 20 of the entire league (regardless of position).

Here’s the deal: if you were a quarterback playing against the Steelers last year, you’d better have the ice tub set up, along with a team of physical therapists (and maybe some psychotherapists too). You were going to need it.

Quarterback hits collapsed in the final six weeks. This is the first category in which the Steelers defense really seemed to slip. These aren’t numbers that most of us really understand, so let me present it this way:

We know that the Steelers recorded fewer sacks as the season dragged on, which means that fewer QBs were hitting the ground before they could throw the ball. That might result in a rise in QB hits, in which a quarterback is hit but manages to get the ball out. Instead, the opposite occurred. The Steelers were simply putting fewer hands on opposing QBs.

To put it another way, during the first ten games, the Steelers players listed above combined for 9.4 QB hits per game; during the final six, they registered 6.7. Removing Bud Dupree’s 1.5 hits undoubtedly made a difference in that number. I suspect that, more importantly, his disruption freed up other players across the field to make contact.

The late-season slide is troubling, but looking at the numbers, this is still a position of power for the Steelers defense.

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QB Knockdowns per Game

Douglas DeFelice-USA TODAY Sports

“QB Knockdowns” denote instances where the quarterback was knocked down after delivering a pass (as opposed to “QB Hits,” which imply contact, but not a post-pass fall).

Reveling in T.J. Watt’s dominance feels old-hat at this point, so instead, let’s take a look at Cam Heyward. Conventional wisdom suggests that players decline after 30, but Heyward (31 in 2020) somehow keeps getting better.

Heyward’s success in this department sunk a bit in the season’s final six weeks, but Stephon Tuitt picked up that slack, and then some. Neither Bud Dupree nor Alex Highsmith were particularly impressive at getting the hit from opposite Watt.

(I have thoughts about Highsmith, which I think I’m going to have to write into an addendum article so this doesn’t get too long.)

I’m not entirely sure how to make sense of this category — maybe Bud Dupree was really good at putting on the breaks as soon as the ball was delivered, so he hurried quarterbacks a lot, but rarely ever touched them after the pass? Overall, the Steelers were one of the lesser-penalized teams in football this past year. Defensive dominance is not always demonstrated by chaotic abandon. Just as often, it’s a controlled fury. This bunch had plenty of discipline.

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Pressures per Game

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Spillane and Highsmith were again engaged in massive ties. I’ve included their numbers for comparison.

Taking sacks, hurries, and QB Knockdowns altogether, the Steelers had four of the top 18 players in the NFL (regardless of position) over the first ten games.

If we’re just thinking of the starting 11 on each team (which, of course, is a very conservative count, since backups and replacements often perform at league levels), there are 352 starting defenders in the NFL. Through 10 weeks, the Steelers had four players in the league’s top 5%.

I’m tempted to keep parsing these numbers, but let’s just say: this was just such a great defense.

As the Steelers sack numbers dipped in the final six weeks, their pressures climbed a bit. In other words, the pass rush continued to roll, even if traditional metrics didn’t reflect it.

(Side note: this category also emphasizes something limiting about stats like these. I recently read that Pro Football Focus had credited Alex Highsmith with 17 pressures in the season’s final five games, whereas I’ve got him with eight over the final six. I don’t know how they calculate such things, but clearly their numbers are different than Pro Football Reference, from which I tracked mine. I refuse to subscribe to PFF, so I can’t vouch for any of their methods. But these unofficial measures (pressures, hurries, etc.) are slightly slapdash. They present more of an overall picture than a precise statement. In other words, the fact that T.J. Watt is so dominant on all these lists is more important than the actual number of hurries he accumulated over a six-game period...)

Pressure is probably the best statistical gauge for a pass rusher, since it counts so many different metrics. With that in mind, notice how the Steelers’ “big 4” were all in the top 20 in the NFL (regardless of position) at generating pressure. This wasn’t just the team that led the league in sacks (for the third straight year, ahem); it was by far the best team at simply harrassing quarterbacks from kickoff to gun.

Let’s talk for a minute about position too:

It might not be obvious from this list, but Cam Heyward and Stephon Tuitt are the most effective defensive line pairing in the NFL. In fact, the only other team with two D-Linemen in the top 30 is Cleveland (Myles Garrett and Olivier Vernon). But let’s be clear: Garrett and Vernon play in a 4-3 defense, which makes them more “edge defenders” than simply “defensive linemen.” Heyward’s and Tuitt’s successes are truly remarkable, given the way Pittsburgh’s line is usually deployed — as space-eating interior linemen.

How about linebackers? Well, it turns out that T.J. Watt and Bud Dupree were also the NFL’s most disruptive linebacking duo. Frankly, there’s no real argument in this category. It’s disappointing, in retrospect, how little the NFL talking heads seemed to notice this. These two really were in a class by themselves.

On that note, if you ever wanted to gauge how disruptive T.J. Watt was in 2020, notice that Bud Dupree was the second best LB in the AFC in this category, according to PFR, and he logged almost 40% fewer pressures per game than Watt.

(Bonus: Watt’s 61 overall pressures led the league by a huge margin as well. Second place was a tie between Joey Bosa and Aaron Donald, with 45. That +16 margin is the largest difference between #1 and #2 since PFR started compiling this stat four years ago.)

Dammit. Because I can’t stop gushing. Here’s a quick short-hand of Watt’s rankings this past season (including tackles for a loss, which I didn’t mention above). I know Donald is a fantastic football player, but can someone explain to me again why Watt wasn’t the DPOY?

In any case, considering the dominance of Steelers corners, safeties, and coverage ILBs, passing against this defense was like playing catch through a hurricane, complete with flying aluminum debris and terror.

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I’m not sure what we learned here, other than “omigod these guys are good.” However, I did have two more thoughts, and they’re probably going to have to come in another essay. I want to talk about the run defense from this front-seven, and I want to talk about Alex Highsmith. So I guess this is a five- or six-round series. Stay tuned. Go Steelers.