The Pittsburgh Steelers recently named Pat Meyer as their new offensive line coach in 2022, but did they make the right decision?
Almost exactly a month after their post-season ended in disaster against the Kansas City Chiefs, the Pittsburgh Steelers have appointed a new offensive line coach. I think it’s fair to say that the reactions are split.
The Steelers official team social website revealed that Pittsburgh has hired Pat Meyer to be their offensive line coach in 2022. Meyer spent the past two years coaching the OL of the Carolina Panthers, and he was the Chargers OL coach from 2017-2019. Meyer has been around the league for a long time with 20 years of coaching experience in all.
Just last season, the Steelers made a change on to their offensive line coach — ditching Shaun Sarrett (an old understudy of Mike Munchak’s) for Adrian Klemm. Unfortunately, Klemm walked away from the team before the season was even over with.
Assistant OL coach, Chris Morgan, took his place. However, before the Steelers could make a decision to keep him around for 2022, the Chicago Bears recently swept up Morgan to run their offensive line.
The way the chips fell this offseason, veteran OL coach Pat Meyer is now their guy. But what he the right man for the job?
Did Steelers hire the right OL coach?
I’m not going to be too hard on the Pat Meyer hiring until I do a little more digging into his success in the past, but I wasn’t exactly jumping for joy when the Steelers made this move. This seemed like nothing more than a name to fill this spot that Mike Tomlin can micromanage.
The Carolina Panthers have had a disastrous offensive line over the past two seasons under Meyer, but he did have a fair amount of success during his tenure with the Chargers. In 2017-2019, Meyer coached an offensive line that had one of the most efficient rushing attacks while also one of the least-sacked quarterbacks during this span, according to Team Rankings.
However, Meyer has his work cut out for him with the Steelers. Pittsburgh has a few players with tools (like Dan Moore and Kevin Dotson), but really not much else to work with, and no guarantee that he can turn things around.
The obvious choice would have been bringing legendary OL coach Mike Munchak to work with the young offensive linemen on the roster. However, Munchak apparently didn’t have enough interest in making this happen. Doug Marone was also an option most fans could get on board with. In addition, there were some younger options out there (some from college teams) who would have been good candidates to bring something new to the table.
Sadly, Meyer probably isn’t going to have much pull in terms of scheme and bringing in talent. That job will no doubt be controlled by Tomlin. Overall, I don’t think Steelers fans should expect the team to do much of anything different with the offensive line this year, outside of bringing in more talent through free agency or the NFL Draft.