Austin’s dual tasks take shape
It’ll be one challenge after another for him
Teryl Austin has a monumental job ahead of him as the new senior defensive assistant/secondary coach on Mike Tomlin’s staff.
It’s not just trying to help the secondary find ways to create more takeaways, specifically interceptions.
Austin, a Sharon native who was a safety at Pitt in the late 1980s, also will serve as an extra set of eyes for Tomlin as an unofficial replay-review coach.
A former defensive coordinator with the Detroit Lions and Cincinnati Bengals, Austin will prepare for the role by reviewing every replay challenge made last year in the NFL. That might be more daunting than getting the cornerbacks and safeties to come up with more than six interceptions, their total in 2018.
“I’ll watch all of them and find out why they were either overturned or not overturned, good or bad, so I can kind of formulate a plan of, when I see something, I think this can possibly be overturned or, OK, keep the flag in your pocket, it won’t be,” Austin said.
Tomlin has not had any success with replay challenges the past couple of seasons. He has not won any of his past 10 challenges, dating to the 2016 AFC championship game in New England. Since the beginning of the 2016 season, he has had just two of 14 challenges successfully overturned. Since 2014, he is 8 for 17.
Since he became coach in 2007, Tomlin has never had a fourthdown challenge overturned by replay (0 for 12).
“What I want to do is give Mike a perspective on whether we should challenge or not challenge, try to streamline the process so we’re
more efficient in that area,” Austin said Wednesday on the second day of minicamp on the South Side. “Obviously, Mike is going to make the final decision. What I’ll be doing is sending a recommendation.”
Austin was hired during the offseason to assist secondary coach Tom Bradley and give the Steelers another coach to oversee 10 players. He was given the title of senior defensive assistant/secondary because he had been a coordinator for four seasons with the Lions (2014-17) and nine games with the Bengals in 2018.
Austin was fired midseason after the Bengals became the first team in the Super Bowl era to give up 500 yards of offense in three consecutive games. That streak came after the Bengals gave up 481 yards in a 28-21 loss to the Steelers.
“It happens,” Austin said. “I don’t ever doubt myself as a coach and what I can do and the way I coach and how I teach people. That stuff happens. It’s a tough business. I had a tough year. Luckily, I had a chance to rebound this year.”
And now Austin is back working in the area where he grew up, across the Monongahela River from where he played safety at Pitt under the late Foge Fazio and Mike Gottfried from 1984-87. Curiously, he is reunited with Bradley, who was the secondary coach at Penn State when Austin began his coaching career as a graduate assistant with the Nittany Lions in 1991.
The original idea was for Bradley and Austin to divvy up the positions — one would work with the cornerbacks, the other with the safeties. Instead, they share the workload.
“It’s real fluid,” Austin said. “What we want to do is make sure our guys are getting the whole perspective from both of us because I think we both have a lot to offer them. When we did the room, we didn’t want to stifle it and say one guy is the lead guy, one guy is the second guy. We flip back and forth between corners and safeties. We do whatever we think is necessary for our guys that day.”
The top priority in OTAs and minicamp has been working on drills to improve the secondary’s abilities to create turnovers, including fumble recoveries. The Steelers had just eight interceptions overall, fifth fewest in the NFL last season and half as many as they had in 2017 (16).
That is a surprisingly low total for a team that tied for the NFL lead with 52 sacks in 2018. Their inability to create splash plays on defense is what keeps the Steelers from being an impactful defense.
Austin wants to help change that.
“He’s been helpful for us,” defensive coordinator Keith Butler said.
“He’s going to be helpful for us in the back end. As far as certain situations of football, he has some things he wants to put in and stuff like that. I have no problem with that, especially if it’s helpful for us and it’s stuff we’ve done before. He’s going to help us.”