Pittsburgh Steelers DL Cameron Heyward will be visiting the Los Angeles Chargers this weekend and playing their style of football, which prioritizes good defense and a solid running game. The Chargers have Justin Herbert at quarterback, but they’ve been a dominant running back this year.
“It’s fun. It’s old-fashioned football,” Heyward said of Sunday’s Steelers-Chargers game. From the team website“If you’re worried about whether your dime package is going to be ready this week, you picked the wrong week. We’ve got some big guys on the field and it should be fun to go out there and play.”
This season, the Steelers have played sub-packages just over half the time, including 16 dime plays for a usage rate of over 13 percent. Notably, nearly all but one of those dime plays came last Sunday against the Denver Broncos. In their season opener against the Atlanta Falcons, they had just one dime play on the first three downs of the game.
When the Steelers went to dime defense, Corey Trice Jr. became the sixth defender. If you’re wondering, this only includes the four snaps that Donte Jackson missed in the last game. When the Steelers went to dime defense, they actually used Da’Monte Kazee as a safety instead of DeShawn Elliott. Don’t ask me why. They just do it. Probably to justify the $3 million they’re paying him.
Defenses use a dime defense (six defensive backs on the field) when they face situations that clearly involve the pass — down-and-distance situations where the odds are pretty low or the offense is behind on the scoreboard — but the Steelers and Chargers have the lowest-scoring defenses in the league this year.
Not only do the Steelers and Chargers have two of the top scoring defenses, they are also two of just six teams with at least 70 rushing attempts this season, with the Steelers leading the NFL with 77. Both teams also deploy a lot of tight ends, running with two 45 percent of the time. In fact, they have used the 22-man system more than any other team in the league so far this season.
The Steelers have done a good job of stopping the run attack over the past two weeks, but we know the Chargers are going to be a problem. For obvious reasons, they are running a run game system reminiscent of recent Baltimore Ravens teams. Jim Harbaugh has brought in his brother as offensive coordinator and two former standout running backs on the team. Greg Roman, J.K. Dobbins and Gus Edwards are all off to very strong starts this year.
The Chargers still use 11-man 53 percent of the time, which ranks in the bottom 10 in the league in percentage. The Steelers rank even lower, so as Heyward said, we’ll see some big men in this game. It’s questionable whether the Steelers will use tackle-eligible Broderick Jones this week. The Chargers are using DL Scott Matlock in a dual role as a fullback and tight end on offense.
