What are your expectations this year for the Steelers defense?

I (strongly) agree with you that ever turnover is an extra drive for the offense. But how many drives for the offense did we lose by being among the worst in the league at getting of the field?

If we were average at 3rd down conversions, I'd be strongly in the turnovers a better camp. But last season I think our inability to get off the field really hamstrung our offense. Which was surprising to me after the opposite being the case for so long.

On any given drive, turning the ball over is obviously better.

But there are way more 3rd downs faced than turnovers.

We we could move from 4th to 10th in turnovers generated and go back to last year's 3rd down conversion rate, I think we'd be a much better defense.

At least that's my guess.

Especially since my guess is that turnovers come in bunches more than something like 3rd down conversion is. Although we easily could have lost our two big turnover games (5 against the Pats and 6 against the Colts) without every one of those turnovers. The margin in both games was 7 points. Which is crazy IMO. How we didn't blow teams out with that many turnovers...although the Pats were a much better team than we were (even if we didn't know it at the time).

Re: 4th down. We ranked 31st in 4th down conversions allowed at 73.7% last year. They don't have the raw stats on the site I was looking at, so I don't know how many attempts there were. The sample sizes might not be big enough for the rankings to mean much.

Google AI says that we allowed 26 4th down conversions of 35 attempts in 2025. That's close, but not equal to the percentage above. Not sure if that means one of the numbers is wrong...or maybe a conversion was by penalty or something that doesn't get counted?

If that number is right, then it's not a small number of "drives taken away from the offense".

https://www.teamrankings.com/nfl/stat/opponent-fourth-down-conversion-pct

 

opposing team were 28-38 on fourth down vs steelers last year...Just to look a bit below in team conversation and you will see

https://www.pro-football-reference.com/teams/pit/2025.htm

 

That is the only statistic that matters

 

Steelers D didn't cause enough turnovers and they had trouble stopping teams on 3rd down.... 3rd and long yardage, too. There's no way in hell anybody in their right mind can compare this current defense to the ones we had from 2001-2011. Those D's of yesteryear got sh!tloads of 3 and outs... and they never got ran on like Dalvin Cook and Derrick Henry have done recenty to our current defense.