Fitzpatrick convinced plays will happen
Safety stays patient despite inactivity
Vikings cornerback Bashaud Breeland made some waves in Minnesota earlier this season when asked if it was embarrassing to be the 103rd-rated player out of 103 at his position by Pro Football Focus. He quipped back that the same reporter would be ranked 101st if such grades were given out to the media.
Steelers star Minkah Fitzpatrick didn’t face any questions Thursday about his subjective — and, many would argue, meaningless — evaluation from the same website, but PFF pegs him as No. 84 among 87 safeties so far this year. It’s one thing for a veteran journeyman such as Breeland to turn in a rough season, another for a two-time All-Pro in Fitzpatrick. Depending on your point of view, that makes his less-than-stellar start to his third Steelers campaign either more or less concerning.
“As a free safety, patience is extremely important,” Fitzpatrick said after practice. “You look at one thing and you step up — one little step — now there’s someone over the top of you. That happened to me this year. I was looking at the wrong thing, stepped up, and the ball was over my head. And it was literally because I took one wrong step. It wasn’t because I flew up and tried to make a tackle or something like that.”
In other words, Fitzpatrick isn’t trying to do too much. His quiet first six games is nothing more than a “drought,” as secondary coach Teryl Austin called it last week, or “circumstantial,” as coach Mike Tomlin put it Tuesday.
But whether you feel Fitzpatrick’s 37.0 grade is an arbitrary assessment of his play or an accurate portrayal, there’s more than that to point out his struggles to this point — relatively speaking, at least. For an ascending not-yet 25-yearold who had nine interceptions through his first 24 games as a Steeler, Fitzpatrick hasn’t picked off a pass since grabbing two in Week 11 last year off quarterback Jake Luton in Jacksonville.
“There’s plays that I’ve missed, there’s plays that just didn’t come. That happens. It happened my first year,” Fitzpatrick said of a rookie season in Miami when he had just two takeaways, both interceptions. “It happened my second year. I made six picks in like five or six games, then eight games, there was nothing. It doesn’t really eat at me. I know they’re going to come.”
It might not eat at him, but he is keeping count.
Showing off the keen football mind that makes him one of Tomlin’s favorite players to coach, Fitzpatrick added that he should have three interceptions already in 2021. Those misses, he said, bother him more than when the ball simply doesn’t come his way.
Another issue Fitzpatrick downplayed is his tackling. He has seven missed tackles after having 11 all of last year, two more than he had in 2019, per Pro Football Reference, but Fitzpatrick mostly chalked that up to “missed tackles happen.” It sounds as if his conversations with Tomlin have been more about that whole patience thing again, even if some fans aren’t feeling all that virtuous toward Fitzpatrick’s performance lately.
“I’ve just got to catch what comes to me, make the plays that come my way, and just keep doing my job. I was just talking to ‘Coach T’ earlier today,” Fitzpatrick said. “Just got to keep doing what I do out there on the field, flying to the ball, and plays are going to come. … He doesn’t want me to do anything extra or over the top, which I won’t, but that just put an emphasis on, ‘Do your job, and it will come.’ ”