The Pittsburgh Steelers had hopes of making the Cincinnati Bengals one-dimensional last Thursday night. They wanted to bottle up what was the league’s worst rushing offense to allow their own pass rushers to impact the game.
That never happened. The Bengals ran for 142 yards, 57 yards more than their previous season-high. Bengals RB Chase Brown averages 3.6 yards per carry this season. That’s after a whopping 9.8 yards per carry against the Steelers. So, what the heck went wrong for the Steelers’ run defense? This was a unit that had allowed less than 100 yards rushing in back-to-back games.
“It’s really simple when you’re not stopping the run,” Steelers head coach Mike Tomlin said Tuesday, per video provided by the team’s YouTube channel. “Usually people are out of their gaps if you’re not being schemed, and they won some of those instances. And that’s just a component of it though. Somebody can break the line of scrimmage and have an eight- or nine-yard run, you live to play another down.
“They had a 25-yard run, a 37-yard run and so that speaks to multi-layers of dysfunction. People out of their gap and us not keeping the ball in a confined space once it gets to the second and third level. And so those are two things that [have] our attention. There’s a gap-integrity component of it, and that’s up front, and oftentimes that’s reflected by yards per. But the explosion play component of it is about netting and keeping the ball in a constricted space. And we didn’t do a good enough job of either.”
The Steelers’ run defense started the season poorly. They allowed the New York Jets to run for 182 yards. The Steelers still won that game, but it was an ugly defensive performance. They improved slightly in the following two games, but it was still not the Steelers’ standard.
Things looked better against the Minnesota Vikings and the Cleveland Browns. The run defense kept both teams under 100 yards rushing. And most people expected that to continue versus the Bengals. But not only did the Bengals churn out yardage regularly on the ground, they got explosive plays, too.
And that’s the problem that Tomlin and his defensive staff have to fix. They failed at the line of scrimmage, and they failed to contain big plays.
“You can have a couple of plays and create a catastrophic day,” Tomlin said. “They had a 25-yard run and a 37-yard run, but that’s all that’s required. You get those big runs, they flip the field, they put them in scoring position. They changed the trajectory of your strategy, et cetera. And so, it’s not 60 snaps we’re talking about here, but in our business at this level, one or two plays are the difference between having a good day and a catastrophic day.”
If you remove those two runs, the Bengals are suddenly back well under 100 yards on the ground. But anytime you allow big runs, there are a multitude of issues. One of the biggest issues that the Steelers’ defense as a whole dealt with was missed tackles. Our own Josh Carney went through and charted the Steelers’ missed tackles versus the Bengals, and it wasn’t pretty.
Chase Brown is LOOSE. Look at Ja’Marr get out and block 👀
PITvsCIN on Prime Video
Also streaming on @NFLPlus pic.twitter.com/rUG5o2bi1B— NFL (@NFL) October 17, 2025
No wonder Brown averaged 7.9 yards after contact last Thursday, per Pro Football Reference. But on that run, you can see failures at all levels of the defense. The Bengals’ offensive line moved Steelers players out of their gaps, and there wasn’t anyone to fill in until almost 10 yards downfield. Then Brown made a move on Steelers S Chuck Clark to really break the run open.
Had the Steelers had made the plays that were right in front of them, perhaps their run defense wouldn’t have looked so porous. But instead of a good day, they had a terrible one. And that contributed to the overall failure of the Steelers’ defense against a divisional rival.
Most people look at how badly Joe Flacco and Co. torched the pass defense and point to that as the reason the Steelers lost. And it was a huge part of that. But the Steelers’ run defense didn’t do anything to help put the Bengals in bad spots throughout the night, either. For Mike Tomlin, the reasons for the run defense’s struggles were quite simple: The Steelers didn’t stay in their gaps, and they didn’t box in Chase Brown when he got to the second level.
