How much longer should Steelers give Terrell Edmunds before demoting him?

The Pittsburgh Steelers haven’t gotten anything out of their former 2018 first-round pick. Here’s why Terrell Edmunds should be on thin ice.

It’s really hard to complain about the Steelers defense so far in 2020. T.J. Watt is the front-runner for the Defensive Player of the Year award through his first three games, while players like Mike Hilton, Tyson Alualu, and Bud Dupree have stepped up in big ways.

Currently, Pittsburgh’s defense is crushing the rest of the league against the run – allowing just 54.0 yards on the ground per game. In terms of overall yardage allowed, the Steelers are 2nd in the league (290.0 per game) and they are 5th in points allowed (19.3), according to Team Rankings.

But despite everything that’s gone right, there has been one player who has failed to take advantage of a talented group surrounding him: Starting strong safety, Terrell Edmunds.

I would livid when the Edmunds’ name was called to the Steelers in the first round of the 2018 NFL Draft. I had the Virginia Tech safety graded as the 3rd round prospect, and he was the 81st player overall on my big board. So far, Edmunds has done nothing except prove that my original assessment on him was correct.

Terrell Edmunds is allergic to making splash plays. Though he had the sack on the blitz that essentially ended the game against the Denver Broncos this year, he’s earned just 8 pass defenses in 34 career starts. What’s worse is his inability to take the ball away. Edmunds has just one career interception that came all the way back in Week 3 of his rookie year. He has now gone a whopping 32 games without an interception and he has never recorded a forced fumble in his NFL career.

How much longer should the Steelers give him?

In addition to his poor production on defense and inability to make plays on the ball, Edmunds has earned a 48.6 overall grade from Pro Football Focus this year – ranking him 62nd among 75 qualifying NFL safeties. All of this begs the question: How much longer should the Steelers give Edmunds to prove himself?

Now in his third NFL season, we would have loved to see a jump in play from the young safety, but if anything, he’s been trending the wrong direction. This reminds me of a lot of Artie Burns. Though they obviously played different positions, Burns’ best games came early in his career, and things progressively got worse as his NFL career went on. By his fourth season, the former first-round pick was benched.

Pittsburgh never likes to give up on players they’ve invested a lot into, but sometimes it’s almost better to bite the bullet and admit you were wrong. Backup Sean Davis is nobody to write home about, so it’s not hard to see why Edmunds still sits atop Pittsburgh’s depth chart.

However, it’s certainly looking more and more like he is a one-contract-and-done type player with the team. The Steelers will ride him out in 2020, but it’s possible they will have a new starting strong safety in 2021 if Terrell Edmunds doesn’t improve quickly.