SteelerWatch

In a word? Dreadful.

For a team that dropped $22.5 million on a five-year contract at the position, the output clearly didn’t equal the input in 2006. Ike Taylor seemed to be a step behind his 2005 performance, in which he was only beat for big plays a single time (80-yard touchdown from Peyton Manning to Marvin Harrison in a Monday night matchup). In 2006, Taylor was regularly beat like a bad dog, and his counterpart on the other side of the field, Deshea Townsend, spent a lot of time chasing open receivers as well. Between the two of them they registered a mere four interceptions and 23 passes defended.

It got so bad that the highly-paid weirdo — that would be Taylor, and you’ll understand the reference if you ever hear him talk about the childhood training regiment his uncle devised for him that included being dragged around his yard at 2:00 a.m. — was benched in favor of second-year player Bryant McFadden, arguably the best corner on the team.

Not what you expect for more than $3 million.

It didn’t help matters that up-and-coming Ricardo Colclough (can anyone explain to me how you get “Coakley” out of that?) went down with a season-ending neck injury during the bye week. Of course, losing a player to a non-football, non-contact injury served as a microcosm of the team’s season that went from bad to good to downright strange from the bye week on.

So consider for a moment what they had to work with by the time week four rolled around: two underachieving starters and a player with 13 career tackles entering the season at nickel back. Then throw in Anthony Madison, who wasn’t even activated until after the fourth game when the team had already fallen to a 1-3 record, and undrafted free agent Javon Johnson, who only played the final two games of the season, and you’ve got the makings of one of the weakest units in professional football. Combined, the cornerbacks accounted for just seven interceptions.

The question isn’t what to do. The answer to that should be obvious to anyone with a pulse. The real question that needs to be asked is: Where do you start?

They have limited speed and their tallest corner is Ike Taylor at 6-feet, 1-inch. Only McFadden has shown to have enough speed to keep up with the faster receivers in the league, and only Townsend has more than four years of experience in the league — and he’s about to play his 10th year, which means he’s probably in decline at this point.

The first place to start is in the draft. Thats really the only place to start, because any player worth anything in free agency has already been signed. So what do they do? They clearly can’t draft three cornerbacks because there aren’t enough picks in the draft for that. They have depth concerns just about everywhere else, though, which means they just need a lot of picks. It’s the whole rock-and-a-hard-place dilemma.

They could alleviate a lot of issues by trading down in at least one round to get more picks. Because of the wealth of good players available early in this year’s draft, they could trade down in the draft without a huge loss of talent. If they could make a trade down for a lower team’s first- and third- or first- and fourth-round picks, they could use those picks to take Penn State’s Paul Posluszny at linebacker and use the extra pick to add quality depth elsewhere. The keyword is quality, because numbers are not the problem.

With good starters just about everywhere else on the team, especially with the recent signing of OL Sean Mahan to bolster the right side of the line, the concerns are largely about depth anyway. That could move cornerback to the top of the list of concerns, so we could see the team use the first-round pick on University of Pittsburgh CB Darrelle Revis, Aaron Ross of the University of Texas, or maybe even Arkansas’s Chris Houston, who recently ripped off a 4.32-second 40-yard dash time and claims to have run a 4.34 40 in plain clothes in high school. He doesn’t bring any more height than the team already has, but he brings speed that hasn’t been here since the days of Rod Woodson.

The bottom line is this: the position has been shaky for years, but 2006 exposed additional weaknesses that Mike Tomlin will need to address in April.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, March 20th, 2007 at 1:07 pm and is filed under Before the Draft, Defense. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.