The Steelers’ Week 3 matchup will be a battle of 1-1 teams as Pittsburgh takes on the New England Patriots on the road.
Despite identical records, each team is heading in a different direction. The Steelers won their first game with a surprising offensive showing but couldn’t keep the momentum in a Week 2 loss to the Seahawks where both sides of the ball disappointed.
New England, on the other hand, opened the season with a loss to the Raiders but rekindled some of their offseason hype with a win over
the Miami Dolphins last week.
Only one of the Steelers or Patriots will escape Week 3 with a winning record. What will Pittsburgh have to gameplan against to succeed in Sunday’s game?
What to expect from the Patriots’ offense
RB: After an ugly 13-point showing in Week 1 against the Raiders, the Patriots showed a lot of improvement in Week 2 against a struggling Miami Dolphins team, winning 33-27 on the road.
One of those touchdowns came on a kick return from the dangerous Antonio Gibson, the current AFC Special Teams Player of the Week, but New England still looked far more balanced and competent on offense in the second week of the season.
In 2025, the Patriots offense is led by coordinator Josh McDaniels, a fixture of the Tom Brady years now in his third stint with the team. He’s calling plays for one of the more promising young quarterbacks in the league in second-year passer Drake Maye, even if his supporting cast is a little lacking in star power.
Under McDaniels, the New England offense has unsurprisingly looked a little old school Patriots at times. Against Miami, Maye was at his best in the death by a million papercuts approach, peppering a subpar Dolphins secondary with quick passes near the middle of the field. At one point, McDaniels even spammed the three-step drop from under center for a couple of easy completions to tight ends to quickly move the chains.
They also use a good bit of play action.
As for pass catchers, the Patriots employ two solid veteran tight ends who know what they’re doing in Austin Hooper and Hunter Henry. The result is a lot of 12 personnel, with some occasional tight-end-as-fullback usage.
The receiver room is similarly solid but unspectacular. Stefon Diggs isn’t close to the player he was in his prime, but he remains a good underneath target. Mack Hollins was a folk hero in Buffalo who now operates in a glorified Ben Skowronek role in New England.
DeMario Douglas has had a quiet start to the year with just six receiving yards, but former LSU receiver Kayshon Boutte has impressed in his third NFL season. He leads the team with 119 receiving yards through two games, including a highlight-worthy touchdown snag against the Dolphins:
If there’s a name to watch among the Patriots’ pass catchers, it’s Boutte.
The quick game is where the Patriots’ passing game has lived this year, and on longer-developing plays they’ve looked a bit worse. The New England offensive line was good in the run game and quick game against Miami, but they had a few more struggles keeping Maye clean in the pocket when he held onto the ball longer than usual.
Plus, the New England front had a sloppy day with five penalties (per Pats Pulpit) and a bad snap.
However, Maye, despite being sacked three times on Sunday, was able to help out his protection thanks to his mobility. He isn’t one of the elite running quarterbacks in the NFL, but he can move in the pocket and is an above-average scrambler. He had 31 rushing yards and a touchdown against Miami, with the score coming on a play where he was flushed out of the pocket and made the most of it.
Despite being a young quarterback, pressure isn’t a surefire way to fluster Maye.
The most standout aspect of the New England offense is the team’s running backs and how McDaniels uses them. Like the previously-mentioned position groups, there’s no household name in the running back room, but the Patriots have a solid stable of backs in Rhamondre Stevenson, second-round rookie TreVeyon Henderson, and Antonio Gibson.
All three see notable snaps in the New England offense, and each have some burst as runners, combining for 4.8 yards per attempt on Sunday. But where they really stood out was in the passing game, where Stevenson had five grabs for 88 yards and Henderson added another two for 30.
A big part of the Patriots’ offense is dumpoffs and screens, but both Stevenson and Henderson had sizable gains on wheel routes out of the backfield against the Dolphins – they’re downfield threats as well.
But at the end of the day, the New England offense didn’t blow me away in any particular aspect. But against a bad team in the Miami Dolphins and with a young quarterback looking sharp and comfortable, they put together a winning performance.
I’m generally not a huge fan of stat graphs, but this one was too perfect not to use. If you want an idea of what the Josh McDaniels Patriots look like, check out the center axis:
New England isn’t overly explosive or efficient. But they’re not bad in either category. They’ve been OK.
Can that beat the Steelers in Week 3? Sure, but as bad as the Pittsburgh defense has been in 2025, I still think they’ll put up a better fight than the Dolphins did last week. (If you don’t believe me, check out Miami’s starting secondary outside of Minkah Fitzpatrick).
Still, the Patriots’ versatile running backs and short, middle-of-the-field passing game should put a good amount of stress on the Steelers’ linebacking unit, which hasn’t lived up to its potential through two weeks.
The good news though is that if the game devolves into a kicking battle, Pittsburgh should have the upper hand. New England’s Andy Borregales missed two of his three extra point attempts against Miami, even if he did settle down later to make a 53-yard field goal later in the game.
What to expect from the Patriots’ defense
Rushing YPG Allowed: 58.5 (3rd)
Passing YPG Allowed: 315.0 (32nd)
PPG Allowed: 23.5 (20th)
RP: The Patriots generated plenty of buzz this summer as a popular dark horse pick to make the playoffs. Most of this stems from the belief that New England has found their franchise quarterback, as Ryland highlighted already. But another reason the vibes around Foxborough were trending upwards heading into the season was because the Patriots hired Mike Vrabel to be their head coach.
Like the previous coach, Jerod Mayo, Vrabel is a former Patriots linebacker. Unlike Mayo, however, there seems to be a greater belief among Patriots fans and the media that Vrabel will be successful in molding this team into what you would expect from a team coached by a former NFL defender. Maybe that’s because, unlike his predecessor, Vrabel played in and won a Super Bowl — Mayo had a season-ending injury in October before the Patriots won in 2014 — or maybe it’s because we’ve already seen him coach a team to the AFC Championship game.
First-time defensive coordinator Terrell Williams leads the New England defense. Williams coached the defensive line for the Lions last season, contributing to a unit ranked fifth in the NFL against the run despite Detroit’s litany of injuries. So far, he has the Patriots’ run defense off to a strong start, ranking third against the run this season, though that could also be because they’ve faced two of the worst rushing teams in the league in the Raiders (31st) and the Dolphins (29th). That could spell trouble for the Steelers (30th), who’ve struggled to get things going on the ground.
The Patriots have a much-improved defensive line from just a year ago. The return of Christian Barmore has been one of the biggest boosts in stopping the run. Barmore started the 2024 season on injured reserve as he was diagnosed with blood clots in July. He briefly returned for four games starting in Week 11, but after experiencing recurring symptoms, he was shelved for the final three games of the year. Now he’s cleared to play again, and he’s wasted no time getting back into top form.
Barmore is joined by a whole new cast of characters on the line. On the interior, journeyman Khyiris Tonga — number 95 in the reel above — was brought in for his solid run defense, while New England’s splashiest move was to bring in Milton Williams from the Eagles on what was announced as a four-year, $104 million deal.
On the edges, New England brought in a pair of outside linebackers: Harold Landry III and
K’Lavon Chaisson. Landry, a former second-round pick who entered the year with 50.5 career sacks, is reuniting with Vrable after spending the previous six seasons in Tennessee. Chaisson, a former first-round pick, has struggled to live up to his draft pedigree. He spent four years in Jacksonville and last year in Las Vegas, managing just 10 career sacks. He has 1.5 sacks so far as a Patriot.
If there is one personnel group the Steelers should hope to take advantage of Sunday, it’s New England’s linebackers. PFF has New England graded as the third-worst tackling team in the NFL, and that’s in large part thanks to the missed tackles by former Steeler Robert Spillane (8) and Christian Elliss (6). That’s the most and second-most missed tackles, regardless of position, in the league. Chaisson (2), as well as defensive backs Jaylinn Hawkins (2) and Marcus Jones (2), have contributed to the problem.
The Steelers should take a leaf from the Raiders’ game plan to attack New England. The Raiders have an elite receiving tight end in Brock Bowers, as well as Michael Mayer, who was highly touted coming out of college and seems to finally be healthy and putting all the pieces together. Against the Patriots, the Raiders targeted their tight ends 12 times, resulting in nine receptions for 141 yards. Las Vegas didn’t do anything fancy, it was mostly drag routes, routes to the flat, and one explosive wheel route to Bowers along the sideline. The Steelers have the horses in Pat Freiermuth and Jonnu Smith. They’ve shown flashes through two weeks, but haven’t been all that productive yet. If not against this New England team, then when?
In the secondary, New England star cornerback Christian Gonzalez — yes, there are three different defenders named Christian, one in each level of the Patriots defense — returned to practice after missing the past seven weeks with a hamstring injury. In his absence, the Patriots were diced up through the air by both Las Vegas and Miami. Against the Raiders, the Patriots ran man coverage roughly 43% of the time, but dialed that back significantly against the Dolphins.
With Gonzalez’s return, Carlton Davis III, another offseason addition, will move into the No. 2 cornerback role. That will get the struggling Alex Austin off the field. A 2023 seventh-round pick out of Oregon State, Austin has been picked on, allowing eight catches on 10 targets for 105 yards and a quarterback rating of 143.8. This should also allow the Patriots to run more man looks again, as both Gonzalez and Davis can thrive in press-man coverage. Gonzalez can struggle getting out of breaks at times, however, so I’d encourage the Steelers to give DK Metcalf a few stop routes this week.
At safety, the Patriots have reunited two Cal Golden Bears. Jaylinn Hawkins and Craig Woodson were teammates in 2019 when Hawkins was in his final year of school and Woodson was an incoming freshman. Hawkins joined the Patriots a year ago after previously playing for the Falcons and Chargers. Woodson was one of my 2025 Draft Gems, and the Patriots were impressed enough by the fourth-round safety this summer to make new Steeler Jabril Peppers expendable and reduce Kyle Dugger’s role to subpackages. Woodson is best in the box and solid in coverage. Hawkins is generally a replacement-level player and allowed a deep touchdown against the Raiders. The Patriots have allowed a few deep shots through two weeks, and that, paired with their poor tackling, has led to them allowing a league-worst 15.2% explosive pass rate, and a pass success rate of 54.7% (29th).
If the Steelers hope to win Sunday, they’ll need to either significantly level up their rushing attack or take advantage of a matchup against one of the worst pass defenses through two weeks. If I were Tomlin and crew, I’d try to get Jaylen Warren, Freiermuth, and Smith in as many matchup advantages against linebackers as I could, and then once the defense begins to creep in, surprise New England with a shot that gets behind the safeties to Metcalf or Calvin Austin. Whether the offensive line can hold up for that is TBD, but on paper, it’s where this defense is vulnerable.
