The MVP frontrunner will have his work cut out for him on Sunday. The Pittsburgh Steelers defense that KC Chiefs QB Alex Smith will see on Sunday is the No. 1 ranked passing defense. It’s still early so it’s a small sample size but Andy Reid took a few minutes to praise their pass defense so far this season.
“This is still a very good defensive football team,” Reid told the KC media this week. “They’ve got a couple different guys in there, but for the most part it’s the same group (as last year) and they play hard and their pass numbers are ridiculous, their defense against the pass is ridiculous. I mean they are just shutting people down. We got our work cut out there.”
The Steelers are ranked No. 1 against the pass but they haven’t exactly faced future Hall of Fame quarterbacks. So far the have played DeShone Kizer, Sam Bradford, Mike Glennon, Joe Flacco and Blake Bortles. Alex Smith is better than all of those guys but they’re still a good group.
On the flip side, they are ranked 28th against the run. The stats say they’re a little Jekyll and Hyde on run defense with three games allowing under 100 rushing yards but two games over 200 yards. These stats say Kareem Hunt should have a big day but he’s also coming off of a 32-touch day last week so I wonder if that affects how much the Chiefs use him.
It’s still early enough in the season that the sample size is small but this was a team that last year shut the Chiefs down. Alex had a 69 quarterback rating last year, which is not a very nice rating. He’s on a streak of five straight games with 100-plus rating so perhaps this is the week the Steelers pass defense comes back to Earth.