While the standout moments of Super Bowl XLIII might be James Harrison’s 100-yard pick-six or Santonio Holmes’ toe-tap, game-winning touchdown, many Steelers fans also remember the reassuring presence of Aaron Smith and Brett Keisel. Their ability to set the tone at 3-4 Defensive End freed up the outside linebackers to go win the game. Cam Heyward has carried on this tradition, and while he’s coming off a career year (possibly even DPOY calibre), he’s aging, and the Steelers need fresh blood along the defensive line.
With that in mind, it’s likely the Steelers will target a defensive tackle early in the draft. But what exactly is their prototype at the position? For Gav’s thoughts, check out Ep 238: The 2024 DL Class at 41:26 —it’s also worth tuning in a bit earlier to hear the reactions to us bringing in Russ and Fields (the innocent optimism of the offseason).
Gav’s ideal 34 DE mold follows the blueprint of Aaron Smith and Brett Keisel: upwards of 6’5” and 300 lbs. But does this align with what the Steelers have historically drafted? And how available is this body type, given that most teams in today’s NFL seek a different kind of defensive lineman for a 4-3 versus the Steelers’ 3-4 base?
Digging Into the Combine Stats
My database, unfortunately, only goes back to 2000—but that still gives us more than 20 years of data and 8,320 players to analyze. Of course, because Americans, all the heights are recorded in feet and inches, which is already a pain for data analysis. Worse yet, the data was encoded as a character vector. Those who know, feel my pain. When I attempted to manually recode it, Excel “helpfully” converted all the heights into dates—6-2 became April 6th, obviously. But after some tedious data wrangling, I finally got something usable.
Note that, 3-4 DE is also not a specific position in the database, I have done my best to remove the obvious nose tackles, but there is a limit, especially when it comes to all DL drafted since 2000!
What the Numbers Say
Taken individually, being 6’5” or over 300 lbs isn’t all that rare for defensive linemen—each falls around the 75th percentile. But being both? That’s a different story, landing in the 95th percentile. Interestingly, neither Aaron Smith nor Brett Keisel weighed more than 300 lbs at the combine. Keisel slimming down for an impressive 4.89 forty time. Adjusting for this, I’ve reset the weight threshold to 279 lbs.
So, do the Steelers have a type? The data suggests they avoid the tall and “lighter” profiles in the top-left of the distribution. Loudermilk is the closest recent example. We can leave the athletic rangy DEs to the 4-3 teams. Meanwhile, if we ignore the short and light corner of the chart (where all the OLBs reside, filtering out all the edge rushers and nose tackles is tricky), the Steelers’ preferred type emerges: tall and heavy, as Gav suggested, but not necessarily the rigid 6’5” standard Gav set. The prototype at DE for the Steelers is minumum 6’3’’ and 290lb .
What stands out is the Steelers’ emphasis on weight at the position compared to the rest of the league (7th heaviest average in the league with all the caveats about nose/edge players sneaking into the analysis). But will they stick to this formula in the upcoming draft, or is it time for a fresh take on the position?